I must admit I find the “dog shaming” pictures that get digitally bandied about hilarious.  One can tell those dogs are really loved and that they have been forgiven for eating/destroying/urinating on whatever it was their sign of shame said.  Wolfies, however, are another story.  They are unwittingly unrepentant.  I have mentioned earlier they are not pets.  It is not because they are vicious; rather they cannot stand to be left alone.  The three of us are their pack — true family — and they do NOT do well when we are gone for any length of time.  In the five years we have had them they have gone through two cyclone fences like butter, eaten an entire sectional — three times, our bed two and a half times, and chawed through all my good rugs, pillows, etc.  To avoid a more lengthy sentence, gentle reader, I will begin anew.  They have gone through a plywood door (it looked nice anyway) that came with the house, a SOLID wood door that had to have the knob custom drilled, an ALL STEEL DOOR which they are currently peeling up from the corner like a can of tuna, plus all the sheet rock for over seven feet … at least two times now.  We had a custom wrought iron guy out and had to have him come back TWICE because these huge animals got out of a space less than three inches wide.  It’s like they can debone themselves which must be great in the wild.  We had a three foot cement trench dug outside in their area which they have almost succeeded in going under.  Oh, and they ate our entire sprinkler system wiring two summers ago; that was fun.  Let’s see, the wood fence was a joke and the thick four by fours we temporarily reinforced them with were laughable as well.  A woman driving 30 mph said Dakota ran in FRONT of her car so he had to be running at least 33 mph when she came to tell me they were out.  Have I mentioned the dog beds?  Gazillions of dollars in luxury beds for them — all shredded within days.  Once on Burk’s birthday we were out and I got a call from a stranger saying they had our dogs and to please come and get them.  We rushed home and there were cops waiting in our house wanting to know exactly which one busted through the door and just who set off the alarm.  I told them as respectfully as I could I had no idea.  What were they going to do — arrest them?  The thing is they do not understand they are being bad.  They are simply highly anxious because their family is gone.  The last time we went to Paris and boarded them Dakota figured out how to unlock the door to their glass suite and he proceeded to go from kennel to kennel, opening all of them as well eating everybody else’s food.  (They were all out playing at the time.)  The owner watched the whole thing on tape and had more admiration for them than ever, God bless him.  When I was pregnant, people EXHORTED me to “get rid of” the wolves.  To do so would be like cutting out a chunk of my heart and who I am.  After enduring humiliating procedures, painful shots daily for months and months on end and two rounds of in vitro, does anyone really think I would put my precious child in jeopardy?!  Let me tell you why wolves are so vital:  they are apex predators in a fragile, rapidly changing, and highly damaged world.  They keep nature in balance (witness the total rejuvenation of Yellowstone) and we need them.  We need them to keep a bit of mystery in our lives; we need them to help remind us we do not walk this earth alone, and we need them to keep a piece of ourselves free.  Fact:  No healthy wolf has EVER killed a human.  When I was in college I was going to do a thesis on the evolution of wolf and man.  Turns out it had already been done.  But American writer and naturalist Henry Beston said it best:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.  And therein do we err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings:  they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”