Brenin never lay down in the back of the Jeep. He always liked to see what was coming. Once, many years ago, we had driven from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, all the way down to Miami – around 800 miles – and back again. And he stood every inch of the way: his hulking presence blocking out much of the sun and all of the rear traffic. But this time, on this short drive into Béziers, he wouldn’t stand; couldn’t stand. And it was then I knew he was gone. I was taking him to the place where he would die. I had told myself that if he stood up, even for part of the journey, I would give it another day; another twenty-four hours for a miracle to occur. But now I knew it was it over. My friend of the past eleven years would be gone. And I didn’t know what sort of person he was going to leave behind.
The dark French midwinter could not have contrasted more starkly with that bright Alabama evening, in early May, a little over a decade earlier, when I first brought six-week-old Brenin into my house and into my world. Within two minutes of his arrival – and I am by no means exaggerating – he had pulled the curtains in the living room (both sets!) off their rails and on to the ground. Next, while I was trying to rehang the curtains, he found his way out into the garden and under the house. At the rear, the house was raised off the ground and you could access the area underneath by way of a door built into the brick wall – a door that I had obviously left ajar.
He made his way under the house and then proceeded – methodically, meticulously but above all quickly – to rip down every single one of the soft, lagged pipes that directed the cold air from the air-conditioning unit up through various vents in the floor. That was Brenin’s trademark attitude to the new and unfamiliar. He liked to see what was coming. He would explore it; embrace it. Then he would trash it. He was mine for all of an hour and already he had cost me $1,000 – $500 to buy him and $500 to repair the air conditioning. And in those days that was not far off one-twentieth of my gross annual salary. This sort of pattern would repeat itself, in often quite innovative and imaginative ways, through all the years of our association. Wolves do not come cheap.
So, if you were thinking of acquiring a wolf, or wolf–dog mix for that matter, the first thing I would say to you is: don’t do it! Don’t ever do it; don’t even think about it. They are not dogs. But if you foolishly persist, then I would tell you that your life is about to change for ever.
I was a couple of years into my first job – Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama, in a city called Tuscaloosa. ‘Tuscaloosa’ is a Choctaw word that means ‘Black Warrior’, and the huge Black Warrior River flows through it. Tuscaloosa is best known for its university’s (American) football team, the Crimson Tide, which the local community embraces with a fervour that surpasses the merely religious – although they’re heavily into that too. I think it’s fair to say that they’re far more suspicious of philosophy – and who can blame them. Life was good; I had far too much fun in Tuscaloosa. But I had grown up with dogs – mostly big dogs like Great Danes – and I missed them. And so, one afternoon, I found myself looking through the want-ads section of the Tuscaloosa News.
For much of its relatively short life, the United States of America pursued a policy of systematic eradication of its wolves – through shooting, poisoning, trapping, whatever means necessary. The result is that there are virtually no free wild wolves in the contiguous forty-eight states. Now that the policy has been abandoned, they’ve started to make a comeback in parts of Wyoming, Montana and Minnesota, and on some of the islands in the Great Lakes – Isle Royale, off the northern coast of Michigan, being the most famous example, largely due to some groundbreaking research on wolves conducted there by the naturalist David Mech. They have even recently been reintroduced, over the strident protestations of ranchers, into the most famous of US natural parks, Yellowstone.
This resurgence in the wolf population, however, has not yet reached Alabama or the South in general. There are lots of coyotes. And there are a few red wolves, in the swamps of Louisiana and east Texas – though no one is really sure what they are, and they may well be the result of historical wolf–coyote hybridization. But timber wolves, or grey wolves as they are sometimes known (inaccurately – since they can also be black, white and brown), are a distant memory in the Southern states.
Therefore I was somewhat surprised when my eye was caught by an advertisement: wolf cubs for sale, 96 per cent. After a quick phone call, I jumped in the car and headed off to Birmingham, about an hour to the north-east, not entirely sure what I was expecting to find. And so it was, a little later, that I came to be standing, eyeball to eyeball, with the biggest wolf I had ever heard of, let alone seen. The owner had shown me around to the back of the house, and the stable and pen that housed the animals. When the father wolf – who was called Yukon – heard us coming he jumped up at the stable door, just as we arrived there, appearing as if from nowhere.
He was huge and imposing, standing slightly taller than me. I had to look up at his face and his strange yellow eyes. But it was his feet I will always remember. People don’t realize – certainly I didn’t – just how big wolves’ feet are, much bigger than those of dogs. It was his feet that announced Yukon’s arrival, the first things I saw as he bounded up to lean over the stable door. They now hung over that door, much bigger than my fists, like furry baseball mitts.
One thing people often ask me, not about this situation in particular – because this is the first time I’ve told anyone of it – but about owning a wolf in general: aren’t you ever scared of him? The answer is, of course, no. I would like to think that this is because I’m an inordinately brave person, but that hypothesis would fly in the face of a large body of countervailing evidence. I need several stiff drinks before I’ll even set foot on a plane, for example. So, unfortunately, I don’t think the attribution of any general-purpose bravery can be sustained. But I am very relaxed around dogs. And this is largely the result of my upbringing: I am the dysfunctional product of a rather dysfunctional family. Happily this dysfunction was – as far as I’m aware – restricted to our interactions with dogs.
When I was young, around two or three, we used to play a game with Boots, our Labrador. He would lie down, and I would sit on his back and hold on to his collar. Then my father would call him. Boots, lightning fast in his younger days, would be on his feet and running in a fraction of a second. My job – the aim of the game – was to hold on to his collar and ride on his back. I never could. It was like I was a dining set and someone pulled the tablecloth out from under me. Sometimes the canine magician’s technique was spot on and I would be left sitting on the ground, in the place where Boots had been lying the moment before, looking somewhat puzzled. Sometimes, however, Boots would get a little sloppy and I would tumble head over heels to the ground. But in this game, any pain would be treated as the minor irrelevance that it was and I would spring up from the grass in glee, begging for a chance to try again. You probably couldn’t get away with this today in our chronically risk-averse culture, with its neurotic attitude towards the possibility of broken bones in the young. Someone would probably call child services, or maybe animal services – or possibly both. But I know I cursed the day when my father told me I had grown too big and heavy to play this game with Boots any more.
Looking back on things, I realize that, when it comes to dogs, my family, and consequently I, are just not normal. We would often take in Great Danes from rescue centres. Sometimes these were lovely animals. Sometimes they were positively psychotic. Blue, a Great Dane unimaginatively named – not by us – after his colour, provides a good case in point. Blue was about three years old when my parents rescued him. And it was easy to understand why he found himself in a rescue centre. Blue had a hobby: the random and indiscriminate biting of people and other animals. Actually, that’s not fair: it wasn’t random or indiscriminate at all. He just had various, let us call them, idiosyncrasies. One of them was not permitting people to leave the room when he was in it. You could never afford to find yourself in a room with Blue on your own. You always needed someone to distract him while you exited. Of course, they would then need someone else to distract Blue should they wish to leave the room. And so the great wheel of Blue’s life turned. Failure to adequately distract him before exiting the room would often result in one’s hindquarters being scarred for life. Just ask my brother, Jon.
My family’s abnormality exhibited itself not just in their willingness to accept Blue’s idiosyncrasies – instead of sending him on a one-way ticket to the vet, like any normal family would have done. More than that, it was in the way they regarded this rather disturbing facet of Blue’s personality as a source of enormous mirth: indeed, as a rather enjoyable game. Most people would probably think, correctly, that Blue was a recidivist danger to limb and possibly life and that, all things considered, the world might be better off without him. But my family enjoyed the game. I think all of them bear the scars of Blue’s idiosyncrasies – and not just on their hindquarters: Blue had other idiosyncrasies too. I alone escaped, but that’s because I had left home for university by the time he arrived on the scene. However, the scars were seen not as sources of sympathy or concern, but as opportunities for general ribbing and gentle ridicule.
Insanity, of course, runs in families; and it was, perhaps, too much to expect me to escape it. A few years ago I found myself playing a daily game with a Dogo Argentino that lived near me in a village in France. These are large, powerful white dogs, like oversized versions of pit bulls, and have been banned in the UK under the Dangerous Dogs Act. When she was a puppy, whenever she saw me, she would excitedly charge up to her garden fence and jump up for me to pat her. As she grew older she continued this behaviour. But at a certain point she obviously decided that, all things considered, it might be a good idea to bite me too. Happily for me, while Dogos are big and strong dogs, they are not fast. Nor are they particularly intelligent: I could almost see the wheels turning in her head while she pondered the possibilities and consequences of biting me. And so each day we would play the same game. I walked past; she would jump up at the fence; I would pat her head; she would enjoy the patting for a few seconds, snuffling her nose into my hand with her tail wagging away merrily; but then her body would stiffen and her mouth purse. Then she would snap at me. To be fair, I think it was pretty half-hearted stuff. She kind of liked me, but felt obligated to bite me because of the company I kept (as we shall see, she had good reason to dislike my entourage – especially one of them). I would whisk my hand away in the nick of time; her jaws would snap shut on empty air; I would bid her à plus tard and wish her better luck tomorrow. I would hate to think I was tormenting her. It was just a game – and I was really curious to see how long it would be before she stopped trying to bite me. She never did.
In any event, I’ve never been afraid of dogs. And this transferred naturally to wolves. I greeted Yukon in the way I would an unfamiliar Great Dane – relaxed and friendly, but nonetheless observing the standard protocols. Yukon turned out to be nothing like Blue, or even my friend the Dogo. He was a good-natured wolf, confident and outgoing. But misunderstandings can, of course, arise even with the best animals. The most typical reason for a dog to bite – and I suspect a similar story can be told for wolves – is that they lose track of your hand. People reach around to pat the back of the dog’s head or neck. Losing sight of your hand, the dog becomes nervous, suspects you might be attacking it and, accordingly, bites. It’s a fear bite – the most common sort. So I let Yukon sniff my hand, and petted him at the front of his neck and chest until he became used to me. We got on like a house on fire.
Brenin’s mother, Sitka – named, I assume, after the variety of spruce tree – was as tall as Yukon, but far rangier and nowhere near as massive. She looked more like a wolf, at least like all the pictures of wolves I had seen – long and lean. There are numerous sub-species of wolf. Sitka, I was told, was an Alaskan tundra wolf. Yukon, on the other hand, was a McKenzie valley wolf, from the north-west of Canada. Their different physical characteristics reflected their membership of these different sub-species.
Sitka was far too preoccupied with the six little bears she had running around her feet to pay me too much attention. And little bears is the best way I can think of describing them – round and soft and fluffy, with no sharp edges. Some of them were grey bears and some of them were brown, three males and three females. I had intended only coming to have a look at the cubs, and then going home to think carefully and soberly about whether I was ready to take on the responsibility of owning a wolf, and so on. When I saw the cubs, however, I knew I was going to take one home: today. In fact, I couldn’t get my chequebook out fast enough. And when the breeder said they didn’t take cheques, I couldn’t drive fast enough down to the nearest ATM to get the cash.
Picking the cub was easier than I thought it was going to be. First of all, I wanted a male. There were three of those. The biggest male – indeed the biggest of the litter – was a grey, who, I could tell, was going to be the spitting image of his father. I knew enough about dogs to realize that he was going to be problematic. Utterly fearless, energetic and dominating his brother and sisters, he was destined to be the alpha male and would take some controlling. With images of Blue flashing before me, and since this was my first wolf, I decided discretion might be the better part of valour. Accordingly, I picked the second-biggest cub from the litter. He was a brown and his colouring reminded me of a little lion cub. Accordingly, I named him Brenin: the Welsh word for king. No doubt he would have been mortified if he knew he was named after a cat.
He didn’t really resemble a cat in any respect. He looked more like one of those grizzly cubs you see on the Discovery Channel, following their mother around Alaska’s Denali National Park. Six weeks old at this time, he was brown flecked with black, but with a cream underbelly that ran from the tip of his tail up to the bottom of his snout. And, like a bear cub, he was thick: big feet, big-boned legs and a big head. His eyes were very dark yellow, bordering on honey – and that is something that never changed. I wouldn’t say he was ‘friendly’ – at least not in the way puppies are friendly. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, enthusiastic, gushing or eager to please. Rather, suspicion was his predominant behavioural characteristic – and, again, that was something that would never change towards anyone except me.
It’s strange. I can remember all these things about Brenin and Yukon and Sitka. I can remember holding Brenin up to my face and looking in his yellow wolf eyes. I can remember the way he felt, with his soft cub fur, between my hands as I held him. I can still picture clearly Yukon standing up on his hind legs, staring down at me, big feet hanging over the stable door. I can still picture Brenin’s brothers and sisters running around the pen, tumbling over each other and jumping back to their feet in glee. But of the person who sold me Brenin, I can remember virtually nothing. Something had already started; a process that would become more and more pronounced as the years rolled on. I was already starting to tune out human beings. When you have a wolf, they take over your life in a way that a dog seldom does. And human company gradually becomes less and less significant for you. I remember the details of Brenin and his parents and siblings – how they looked, how they felt, what they did, the sounds they made. I can even remember their smell. Their details, in all their vividness, complexity, richness and glory, still stand as clear in my mind today as they did then. But of the man who owned them I remember only the outlines; the gist. I remember his story – at least I think I do – but I don’t remember the man.
He had moved down from Alaska, bringing a breeding pair of wolves with him. However, it is against the law – I’m not sure whether that was state or federal law – to buy, sell or own pure-blood wolves. You can buy, sell and own wolf–dog hybrids, and the highest ratio of wolf to dog allowed by law is 96 per cent. He assured me that they were, in fact, wolves, not wolf–dog hybrids. Since, a few hours earlier, I had never even known I could own a wolf–dog, I didn’t really care. I paid him the $500 I had extracted from the ATM, pretty much emptying my bank account in the process, and took Brenin home with me that very afternoon. And there we began thrashing out the terms of our association.
After his initial destructive surge, which lasted about fifteen minutes or so, Brenin went into a deep depression, making himself a den under my desk and refusing to come out or eat. This lasted a couple of days. I assumed he was devastated at losing his brothers and sisters. I felt so sorry for him, and very guilty. I wished I could have bought a brother or sister to keep him company, but I simply didn’t have the money. In a day or two, however, his mood began to lift. And, when it did, the first rule of our mutual accommodation became clear – very clear, in fact. The rule was that Brenin was never, ever, under any circumstances, to be left on his own in the house. Failure to abide by this rule involved dire consequences for the house and its contents; and the fate of the curtains and the air-conditioning pipes was merely a gentle warning of his true capabilities in this regard. These consequences included destruction of all furniture and carpets, with a soiling option also available for the latter. Wolves, I learned, get bored very, very quickly – about thirty seconds of being left to their own devices is generally long enough. When Brenin got bored he would either chew on things or urinate on them, or chew on things and then urinate on them. Very occasionally, he would even urinate on things and then chew them, but I think that was just because, in all the excitement, he would forget exactly where he was in the order of proceedings. But the upshot was that wherever I went Brenin had to go too.
Of course, when the ‘I’ in question is a wolf, the rule ‘wherever you go I go too’ precludes most forms of gainful employment. That is just one reason, one of many, never to find yourself owning a wolf. However, I was lucky. To begin with, I was a university professor – and I really didn’t have to go into work very often anyway. Even better, Brenin arrived during the university’s three-month-long summer hiatus, and so I didn’t have to go into work at all. This gave me ample time both to properly recognize Brenin’s immense appetite for destruction and to prepare him for the obviously obligatory journeys into work with me.
Some people say you can’t train wolves. They’re actually quite wrong; you can pretty much train anything if you find the right method – that is the hard part. With a wolf, there are so many ways of getting it wrong, but, as far as I know, only one way of getting it right. But that’s almost true of dogs as well. Perhaps the most common misconception people have is that training has something to do with ego. They think of it as a battle of wills, where their dog has to be pressed to conform. Indeed, when we talk of someone being ‘brought to heel’, that is the sort of thing we have in mind. The mistake this sort of person makes is to see training as too personal. Any unwillingness on the part of their dog they then see as a personal slight – an insult to their masculinity (and it’s usually a man who sees training in this way). And then, of course, they turn nasty. The first rule of dog training is, or should be, that there is nothing personal involved. Training is not a battle of wills, and if you think of it in that way, it is going to go disastrously wrong. If you are trying to train a big, aggressive dog in this way, he will, in all likelihood, grow up to be not very nice at all.
The opposite mistake is to think that your dog’s obedience can be obtained not through domination but by rewards. The rewards can take different forms. Some people obsessively pop treats into the mouths of their dogs for accomplishing even the easiest of tasks. The most obvious result of this is a fat dog that will refuse to obey its owner when it suspects there is no treat around to be offered, or when it is distracted by something – a cat, another dog, a jogger, etc. – that it deems more interesting than a treat. More often, however, the ‘reward’ takes the form of an inane chatter they insist in carrying on with their dog. ‘Good boy’ … ‘Aren’t you a clever boy, then?’ … ‘This way’ … ‘Heel’ … ‘What a clever dog you are’ – and so on and so forth. And they often accompany this chatter with nagging little tugs on the lead to, as they see it, help reinforce their message. This is, in fact, precisely the way not to train a dog – and it hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of working with a wolf. If you’re continually talking to your dog, or half-heartedly tugging on his lead, he has no need to watch you. In fact, he has no reason to give a fig about what you’re doing. He can do what he likes in the sure knowledge that you will let him know what’s happening – and that he can act on or disregard this information as he chooses.
People who think that their dog’s obedience can be bought are people who think – and how often have I heard this – that their dog basically wants to do as his ‘master’ wants – he always aims to please – and simply needs to have explained to him precisely what this is. And this is, of course, nonsense. Your dog doesn’t want to obey you any more than you want to obey anyone else. Why should he? The key to training your dog is to make him think he has no choice in the matter. This is not because he is made to feel the loser in a battle of wills, but because of an attitude of calm but remorseless inevitability that you must bring to your training. In a battle of wills, you are saying to the wolf: you will do what I say – I am giving you no choice. But the attitude with which to train a wolf is: you will do what the situation demands – this situation affords no other option. It is not I to whom you are responding; it is the world. Maybe it’s scant consolation for the wolf. But it certainly helps put the trainer in his or her proper place – not as a dominant and arbitrary authority whose will is to be obeyed at all costs, but as an educator who allows the wolf to understand what the world requires of it. Of all the methods of training a dog, it is the Koehler method that elevates this attitude to an art form.
When I was a kid – around six or seven – I used to go to Saturday morning cinema shows with my friends. I would be given 10p by my mum and we would walk a couple of miles into town. It cost 5p to get into the cinema and 3½p for a can of MacCola, sold, improbably enough, not by McDonald’s – they hadn’t reached Wales at this time – but by the fishmonger chain MacFisheries. I remember only one film from those days and only one scene from that film. This was the scene in The Swiss Family Robinson where the somewhat unwelcome advances of a tiger are rebuffed by the family’s two Great Danes. The scene obviously made a great impression on me – no doubt because I grew up with Great Danes. The scene was the work of an animal trainer, William Koehler. My six-year-old self would never have believed – but would undoubtedly have been delighted – that in twenty years’ time I would be using Koehler’s methods to train a wolf.
This came about through one of the fortuitous coincidences that have casually littered my life. A few months earlier, I had stumbled across a book in the University of Alabama library: Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task. Hearne was a professional animal trainer who combined her profession with an amateur interest in philosophy. There are not too many of those around. It is safe to say that she was a better animal trainer than philosopher – the philosophy seemed to consist largely of a somewhat confused version of the sort of philosophy of language developed by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, I found her book both interesting and suggestive. If her philosophy of language was confused, one thing she was unequivocal about was that, by a country mile, the best dog trainer around was William Koehler. When Brenin arrived on the scene, therefore, I had a good idea where to turn – philosophical solidarity, if nothing else, dictated it.
Between you and me, Koehler was a bit of a psychopath. And, in places, his training involves certain excesses that I personally have no interest in pursuing. For example, if your dog persists in digging holes in the garden, Koehler’s instructions are to fill the hole with water and duck your dog’s head in it. And then – get this – continue for five days, irrespective of whether your dog has dug any more holes. The idea is to create in your dog an aversion to holes. The method is based on sound behaviourist principles, and would almost certainly work. It’s presumably the sort of method the US military adapted for torturing insurgents, and some unlucky bystanders, in Abu Ghraib. (I didn’t find any reference to waterboarding your dog in Koehler’s book, but I suspect he would have approved.)
Koehler’s advice would actually have stood me in good stead during Brenin’s den-digging phase – a ‘phase’ that lasted the best part of four years – during which time my garden – actually, there was more than one garden involved – was transformed into something resembling the Somme. But I never had the heart to use it: I always liked Brenin a lot more than my garden. And, anyway, the trench-warfare landscaping actually possessed a certain charm that grew on me after a while.
However, if you strip away its excesses, you will find that the Koehler method, in general, is based on a very simple, and effective, principle: your dog/wolf must be made to watch you. The key to training Brenin – and I am eternally grateful to Koehler for being right about this – was to calmly but remorselessly make him have to watch me. Getting the animal to look at what you are doing, and so take its lead from you, is the cornerstone of any training regime – whether that animal is a wolf or a dog. But it is especially important in a wolf, and it is a more difficult thing to get a wolf to do. Dogs do it naturally; but wolves have to be persuaded to do it. The reasons for this can be found in their different histories.
Over the past few decades there have been a number of studies conducted with the aim of gauging which are the most intelligent, dogs or wolves. These studies, in my view, all converge on a single answer: neither. The intelligence of wolves and dogs is different because it has been shaped by different environments and is, therefore, a response to different needs and requirements. Generally, the picture is this: wolves do better than dogs on problem tasks, while dogs do better than wolves on training tasks.
A problem task is one that requires the animal to engage in some form of means–end reasoning. For example, Harry Frank, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan-Flint, reports on how one of his wolves learned to open the door from its kennels into the outside compound. To be opened, the handle of the door first had to be pushed towards the door and then it had to be rotated. Frank reports that a dog – a malamute – that also lived at the facility watched them do this several times a day for six years and never learned how to do it himself. A malamute–wolf hybrid acquired the skill after two weeks. But the wolf learned the task after watching the hybrid once. And she didn’t use the same technique as the hybrid: he used his muzzle, she used her paws. This seems to show that she understood the nature of the problem, and what had to be done to solve it, and was not merely copying the behaviour of the hybrid.
Test after test has conformed that wolves outshine dogs in these sorts of means–end reasoning cases. Dogs, however, outshine wolves on tests that require instruction or training. In one test of this sort, for example, dogs and wolves were required to execute a right turn whenever a light flashed. Dogs could be trained to do this; but wolves, apparently, could not – at least not for the duration of the tests.
In the first case, the problem to be solved is a mechanical one. The desired end is getting out into the compound, and there is one and only one means available to achieving this end: the door handle has to be manipulated in an appropriate way and order. But in the training test, there is no mechanical relationship between the flashing light and a right turn. Why a right turn and not a left? Why a turn at all? The connection between the flashing light and the subsequent required behaviour is an arbitrary one.
It is easy to see why there should be this difference between wolves and dogs. Wolves live in a mechanical world. If, for example, there is a fallen tree balanced precariously on a boulder, then the wolf can see that walking underneath it is a bad idea. It can see this because, in the past, wolves that could not see this would be far more likely to be crushed by falling objects than those that could. Therefore wolves that could not understand the relationship between the tree, the rock and possible danger would be less likely to pass on their genes than those who could. The environment of the wolf, in this way, selects for mechanical intelligence.
Contrast this with the world of the dog. The dog lives in what is for him a magical world rather than a mechanical one. When I travel for work, I’ll call home to talk to my wife, Emma. Nina, our German shepherd–malamute cross, gets very excited when she hears my voice and starts bouncing around and barking. And if Emma holds out the phone, Nina will lick it enthusiastically. Dogs are comfortable with magic. Who would have thought that the voice of the pack’s alpha male could materialize from nowhere whenever someone holds up that funny-shaped thing on the desk? There again, who would have thought that flipping a switch on the wall would transform darkness into light? The world of the dog makes no mechanical sense. And even if it did, the means of controlling it are outside the dog’s abilities. It cannot reach the light switch. It cannot dial a phone number. And it cannot insert a key into a lock.
I have to be careful here and not become carried away, or you’re liable to get a lecture on embodied and embedded cognition. In my professional life, what I’m probably most known for is being one of the architects of a view of the mind that sees it as essentially embodied and embedded in the world around it. Mental activities do not just take place inside our heads – they are not just brain processes. Rather, they also involve activities we do in the world: in particular, the manipulation, transformation and exploitation of relevant environmental structures. And already the lecture is in full swing. The forerunner of this view was the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who, with his colleague Anton Luria, demonstrated just how much processes of remembering and other mental activities had changed with the development of an external device for storing information. The outstanding natural memory of primitive cultures gradually withers away as we rely more and more on written language as a way of storing our memories. On an evolutionary timescale, the development of written language is, of course, a very recent phenomenon. Nonetheless, its effect on memory and other mental activities has been profound.
To cut a long lecture short, the dog has been embedded in a very different environment from the wolf. Therefore its psychological processes and abilities have developed in very different ways. In particular, the dog has been forced to rely on us. More than that, it has developed the ability to use us to solve its various problems, cognitive and otherwise. For dogs, we are useful information-processing devices. We humans are part of the dog’s extended mind. When a dog faces a mechanical problem it finds impossible to solve, what does it do? It enlists our help. As I write this sentence, I am provided with a simple yet vivid example of this principle. Nina wants to go out into the garden. Not being able to open the door herself, she stands by the door and looks at me. If I hadn’t seen her, she would have given a little bark. Clever girl. The environment of the wolf has selected for mechanical intelligence. But the environment of the dog has selected for the ability to use us. And to use us they have to be able to read us. When an intelligent dog is faced with an insoluble problem, the first thing it will do is look at its owner’s face. Encultured into a world of magic, this comes naturally to the dog. But a wolf will not do this. The key to training a wolf is getting it to do so.
Of course, this is all after-the-fact rationalization. I didn’t know any of it then. Brenin was an old wolf by the time I published my first book on this sort of stuff. And I’m still trying to refine the view. But it is interesting that a theory I should only develop many years later should allow me to understand just why the method I had chosen to train my wolf should be so effective – and I can’t help thinking the process of training got me thinking, on some unconscious level, in the right sort of way to later develop the theory. If so, this might be another of those aforementioned fortuitous coincidences.
Following the Koehler method, then, Brenin’s training began like this. I acquired a fifteen-foot piece of rope which I fashioned into a leash. We would go out into the large back garden and I would set up three clearly visible markers – in this case, long wooden stakes hammered into the ground. I would attach the rope to Brenin’s choke-chain. Don’t let anyone tell you that choke-chains are cruel: they are essential for effective training since they communicate to a dog exactly what is required of him. The message sent by ordinary collars is far less precise and training will take longer as a result. I would walk from one marker to the next – at times of my own choosing and selecting markers at random. I did this impassively, without looking at Brenin or even acknowledging his presence.
One component of a successful and intelligent training programme is to always put yourself in the shoes of your dog. It’s ironic, and to me highly amusing, that some philosophers still question whether animals have minds – whether they can think, believe, reason, even feel. They should try getting their noses out of their books and train a dog some time. The training programme will always throw something unexpected at you. Your dog won’t do what he’s supposed to; and you won’t be able to find the answer in the book – even in one as thoughtful and comprehensive as Koehler’s. Then the only recourse you have is to try and think like your dog. If you do that, you can usually work out what you should do.
Put yourself in Brenin’s shoes. If he charges off in one direction, he is going to have fifteen feet of rope to get up a fair head of steam, but then will be snapped to a sharp halt. The effect is exacerbated if he is charging in one direction when I’m walking in another. Soon – very soon – he works out that if he is to avoid this unpleasantness he is going to have to watch where I am going. Initially, he tries to do his watching from the limits of the leash. But this makes him vulnerable to me performing a sharp turn away from him, which I then do. So he comes closer to me. Now he tries to walk a little in front of me – but far enough back to see what I am doing out of the corner of his eye. This, apparently, is entirely typical. I rectified this by turning sharply into him, driving my knee – impassively rather than savagely – into his ribs. So then he starts walking behind me – clever boy. I corrected this by stopping sharply and walking back into him, treading on his feet if possible. Then, understandably, he tries walking as far as he can from me. But now he is again at or near the extent of the leash – and this makes him vulnerable to my making a sharp turn away from him – a turn that I, of course, now perform. And so we are back at the beginning. This is all done in silence and completely dispassionately. That is the calm but remorseless face of Koehler’s method. There is nothing personal in a wolf’s mistakes and you must never ever lose your temper with them. Very soon, Brenin has exhausted all the possible ways of not cooperating with me. All that is left for him is cooperation. And so he walks to heel.
People – including people who owned wolves – told me that it was impossible to train a wolf to walk on a leash. Those are the sorts of people who keep their wolves, wolf–dogs or dogs locked up in a run in the back garden. And that, I believe, is a criminal act for which a custodial sentence would be appropriate (and, of course, it would certainly help them put themselves in their wolf’s shoes). It actually took no more than two minutes to get Brenin to walk on a leash. Other people told me it was impossible to train a wolf to walk to heel. That took a further ten minutes.
Once we had mastered the basics of on-leash walking, teaching Brenin to walk off leash was surprisingly easy – because, crucially, he already understood what he was supposed to do. First, we worked with the leash still attached to him but without me holding on to it. Then, when that was successful, we progressed to walking without the leash altogether. Here, the use of a throw-chain is essential. This is a smaller version of his choke-chain – actually I used a choke-chain designed for a small dog. If Brenin broke away from heel, I first rattled the throw-chain and then hurled it at him. When hit, the pain would be sharp, but quickly dissipate. And, of course, no lasting damage would be done. How do I know this? Because, being a little circumspect about this part of the Koehler programme, I had a friend throw the chain at me a few times first. Quite quickly Brenin came to associate the rattle of the chain with the unpleasantness to follow, and there was no further need to throw the chain at him. It took four days (two thirty-minute sessions per day) to train him to walk to heel off a leash.
I taught Brenin only what I thought he needed to know. I never saw the point of teaching him tricks. If he didn’t feel like rolling over, why should I require him to do so? I didn’t even bother teaching him to sit – whether he sat or stood was, as far as I was concerned, an entirely personal decision. Walking to heel quickly became his default behaviour. There were only four other things he needed to know:
Off you go and sniff around – ‘Go on!’
Stay where you are – ‘Stay!’
Come to me – ‘Here!’
And most important of all:
Leave it alone – ‘Out!’
The pronunciation of each was guttural, like a growl. Later we worked on finger clicks and hand signals. By the time the summer was over Brenin was fairly – I wouldn’t say thoroughly, but he was getting there – proficient in this basic verbal and non-verbal language.
I know: I’m far too smug about this. But this training was the greatest gift I ever gave Brenin – a shining example of one of the few things in my life I really did right. Some people think that training dogs – and, even more so, wolves – is cruel, as if you are going to break their spirit or make them permanently cowed. But far from breaking his spirit, when a dog or wolf knows exactly what is and what is not expected of him his confidence, and as a result his composure, grow immensely. It is a hard truth that, as Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, those who can’t discipline themselves will quickly find somebody else doing it for them. And, for Brenin, it was my responsibility to be that somebody. But the relation between discipline and freedom is a deep and important one: far from being opposed to freedom, discipline is what makes the most worthwhile forms of freedom possible. Without discipline there is no real freedom; there is only licence.
On our walks over the next decade or so we would sometimes meet dog owners who always kept their dogs – often these were wolf-like dogs such as huskies and malamutes – on leads, claiming that otherwise the dogs would charge off into the distance and they would never get them back on the lead or possibly even see them again. This may well have been true. But it certainly didn’t have to be that way. Later, when we lived in Ireland, we walked every day through fields of sheep with Brenin unleashed. I was, admittedly, a little nervous the first time we tried it – though possibly not as nervous as the sheep. And during the whole of our time together, I never had to shout at Brenin; and I never hit him. One thing of which I’m fairly certain is that if a wolf can be trained to completely ignore his archetypal prey, then any dog can be trained to come when called.
As you will see, Brenin would go on to lead what was, for a wolf, almost certainly an unprecedented life. He led this life because I could, and therefore did, take him everywhere I went. Admittedly, the impetus for this was Brenin’s capacity to reduce my house to rubble on any given unattended morning while I did my lecturing. But the possibility of our living together in any meaningful way – in contrast to him being stuck out in the back garden and forgotten – was provided by him learning a language. This language gave his life a structure it otherwise could not have had and because of this revealed a canvas of possibilities it otherwise could not have contained. Brenin learned a language, and given that he was going to be living in a human world, a magical world rather than a mechanical one, this language set him free.
An unprecedented life, of course, is not necessarily a good one. I was sometimes asked: how could you do this? How could I take an animal out of its natural environment and force it to live a life that it must have found completely unnatural? It was almost always a particular kind of person who asked this question: a middle-class liberal academic with green pretensions who had no history or knowledge of dog ownership. But casting aspersions on the person who asks the question, rather than looking at the question itself, is what’s known in philosophy as an ad hominem fallacy. The question itself is a good one and should be addressed.
First of all, I suppose I could point out that Brenin was born in captivity not in the wild, and without the requisite training from his parents would have quickly perished had he been ‘released’ into the wild. But this response doesn’t get me very far. By paying money for Brenin, I was perpetuating a system that saw wolves bred in captivity, thus depriving them of the opportunity to act as nature had intended. So the question then is: how could I justify doing this?
What underpins the question is, I think, this belief: a wolf can only be truly happy or fulfilled doing what nature intended it to do – engaging in its natural behaviours like hunting and interacting with other pack members. This claim may seem obviously true, but is, in fact, difficult to pin down. First of all, there is the rather tricky idea of what nature intended. What does nature intend for a wolf? Or, for that matter, what does it intend for a human? Indeed, in what sense can nature intend anything at all? In evolutionary theory, we sometimes talk, metaphorically, of what nature intends, but such talk basically amounts to this: nature ‘intends’ creatures to propagate their genes. The only concrete sense that can be given to the idea of nature’s intentions is grounded in the concept of genetic success. Hunting and the life of the pack are strategies employed by animals like wolves in order to satisfy this basic biological imperative. Even wolves, however, can adopt different strategies. At one point in their history, for reasons that are still unclear, wolves attached themselves to human packs and became dogs. To the extent that nature has intentions at all, this was part of her intentions no more and no less than wolves remaining wolves.
This is a useful trick I learned from philosophy: when someone makes a claim, try and work out what are the presuppositions of this claim. So, if someone says that wolves can be happy only engaging in natural behaviours such as hunting and interacting with their pack, what are the presuppositions of this claim? When we look at the presuppositions, what I think we find are, at least for the most part, expressions of human arrogance.
Jean-Paul Sartre once tried to define the idea of a human being by saying that for humans, and humans alone, their existence precedes their essence. This was the foundational principle of the philosophical movement that became known as existentialism. The being of humans, Sartre claimed, is being-for-itself; and this contrasts with the being of everything else, which is merely being-in-itself. As Sartre unhelpfully put it, humans are the beings who have their being to be. What he meant was that humans have to choose how to live their lives and cannot rely on any pre-given rules or principles – religious, moral, scientific or otherwise – telling them how to do it. To adopt a particular principle, a moral or religious maxim for example, is an expression of choice. So, no matter what you do and no matter how you live, this is always ultimately an expression of your free will. Humans are, as Sartre put it, condemned to be free.
The other side of the coin is that, for Sartre, everything else is not free. Other things, even other living things, can do only what they have been designed to do. If countless millennia of evolution have shaped wolves into hunting, pack-living animals, then this provides the only viable form of life for them. A wolf does not have its being to be. A wolf can only be what it is. The presupposition that underlies our question – how could you do this to Brenin? – is, then, this: a wolf’s essence precedes its existence.
Of course, it’s not clear that Sartre was right about human freedom. But what I’m interested in is this more general idea of existential flexibility. Why should it be that humans, and only humans, are capable of living their lives in myriad different ways, while every other creature is condemned to be a slave of its biological heritage – a mere servant of its natural history? Upon what can this idea be based other than a residual form of human arrogance? A couple of years ago I was sitting in the beer garden of a hotel not far from Gatwick Airport the evening before an early-morning flight to Athens. A fox came up to me and sat down like a dog no more than a few feet away, patiently waiting to see if I would throw it a few scraps of food – which, of course, I did. The waitress told me he (or she) was a regular fixture at the hotel – and apparently some of the other hotels too. Try telling this fox that it should be engaged in its natural behaviour of hunting mice. Try telling this fox that its essence precedes its existence and that, unlike me, it doesn’t have its being to be.
We demean the fox when we think of its natural behaviour as restricted to hunting mice. We demean its intelligence and its resourcefulness when we adopt such a restrictive conception of, as Sartre would put it, its being. What is natural for the fox is continually shifting with the vicissitudes of history and fortune. And, therefore, so too is the being of the fox – what the fox is.
Of course, you cannot simply dismiss the constraints of natural history. The fox would be neither happy nor fulfilled sitting day after day in a cage. Neither would a wolf. And neither would I. We all have certain basic needs bequeathed us by our history. But it would be a non sequitur to suppose that the wolf and the fox are merely biological marionettes whose strings are pulled by their history. Their essence may constrain their existence, but it does not fix or determine it. This is as true of the fox and the wolf as it is of us. In life, we each play the hand we have been dealt. Sometimes the hand is so bad we can do nothing at all with it. But sometimes it is not – and then we can play it well or badly. The hand dealt the fox was rapid urban encroachment on to what we like to think of as its natural habitat – although it has, I think, been a very, very long time since that nomenclature made any real sense. My friend the fox, I suspect, was playing his hand rather well, judging by the way he progressed from table to table – but only the tables where there was food – sitting patiently until the requisite offerings had been made.
Brenin, too, was dealt a certain hand, and I think he played it pretty well. It wasn’t really that bad a hand anyway. He could have ended up, like so many wolves and wolf hybrids whose owners cannot handle them, in a cage in the backyard. Instead, he had a varied and, I would like to think, stimulating life. I made sure he had at least one long walk every day – and his training permitted this to be off leash. When circumstances permitted, I made sure he had the opportunity to engage in natural behaviours like hunting and interacting with other canines. I did my best to make sure that he was never bored – the chore of sitting through my lectures notwithstanding. To suppose that Brenin could not be happy simply because he was not doing what natural wolves do is little more than a banal form of human arrogance, and belittles his intelligence and flexibility.
Brenin was, of course, following in the footsteps of his ancestors of some 15,000 years ago – echoing the call of the civilized that drew them into a symbiotic, and perhaps unbreakable, relationship with the most powerful and vicious of the great apes. In terms of genetic success, you have only to count the number of wolves in the world today versus the number of dogs – roughly 400,000 versus 400 million – to understand that this was a breathtakingly successful strategy. And to suppose that this is an unnatural thing for a wolf to do betrays a pretty facile understanding of what is natural. When you add to this the rather abbreviated lifespan of wolves in the wild – seven years is going some – and the typically unpleasant manner of their deaths, then the call of the civilized was perhaps not an unmitigated disaster.
I think the Koehler method that I used to train Brenin was ultimately so successful because it resonates with a certain understanding of the existential nature of dogs and their wild brothers. This was hidden by my caricatural dismissal of some of its excesses. Animating the Koehler method is a kind of faith. It is the faith that the essence of a dog, or a wolf, does not precede its existence. It is the faith that a dog, or a wolf, has its being to be no more and no less than a human being. Because of this, it is necessary to accord any dog or wolf a certain kind of respect and, on the basis of that, a certain kind of right – a moral right. This, as Koehler puts it, is ‘the right to the consequences of its actions’. A wolf is not a puppet made flesh, blindly following the dictates of its biological heritage – at least no more than human beings are. A wolf is adaptable – not infinitely adaptable, but then what is? A wolf, no less than a human, can play the hand it has been dealt. And, what is more, you can help it to do this. As it becomes better at playing this hand, it becomes more confident. It enjoys what it learns and wants to learn more. It becomes stronger and consequently happier.
Was Brenin a slave? Was he a slave because I set the parameters of his education and so determined the contours of his future action? Does the fact that I spent seven years at a ‘bog standard’ comprehensive school, followed by three years at Manchester and two years at Oxford universities – where the parameters of my education were very definitely set by other people – make me a slave? If Brenin was a slave, then so too am I. But if so, what does the word ‘slave’ mean? If we are all slaves, then who is the master? And if there is no master, then who is the slave?
Perhaps this argument isn’t as good as I think it is. Perhaps my judgement is clouded by everything Brenin did for me. Some people get dogs and, after the novelty has worn off, basically stick them out in the back garden and forget about them. Then the dog becomes nothing more than a chore. They have to be fed and watered, and that’s the only interaction these people will have with their dogs – something boring, something they don’t feel like doing but figure they should do. Some people even think that as long as they regularly feed and water their dog they’re being good owners. If that is the way you feel about it, why bother getting a dog? You get nothing out of it, only the daily irritation of having to do something you really don’t feel like doing. But when a dog lives in your house with you, when he inserts himself into your life so completely that he becomes part of that life, that is where all the joy is found. Having a dog is like any relationship: you only get out of it what you are willing to put in – and willing to allow in. The same is true of a wolf. But because a wolf is not a dog – because a wolf has foibles that a dog does not – you have to work so much harder at bringing him in.
Brenin and I were inseparable for eleven years. Homes would change, jobs would change, countries and even continents would change, and my other relationships would come and go – mostly go. But Brenin was always there – at home, at work and at play. He was the first thing I would see in the morning when I woke – largely because he would be the one to wake me, around daybreak with a big wet lick to the face – a looming presence of meaty breath and sandpaper tongue framed by dawn’s murky light. And that was on a good day – on bad days he would have caught and killed a bird in the garden and would wake me up by dropping it on my face. (The first rule of living with a wolf: always expect the unexpected.) He would lie under my desk while I wrote in the mornings. He would walk or run with me almost every day of his life. He would come into class with me while I did my lecturing in the afternoons. And he would sit with me in the evenings while I worked my way through innumerable bottles of Jack Daniel’s.
It was not just that I loved having him around – although I did. Much of what I learned, about how to live and how to conduct myself, I learned during those eleven years. Much of what I know about life and its meaning I learned from him. What it is to be human: I learned this from a wolf. And so thoroughly did he insert himself into every facet of my life, so seamlessly did our lives become intertwined, that I came to understand, even define, myself in terms of my relationship to Brenin.
Some people say that owning pets is wrong because it makes them your property. Technically, I suppose this is true. There is some minimal legal sense in which I could be said to have been the owner of Brenin – although since, for much of his life, I didn’t have any sort of documents recording ownership, it is not clear how I could have demonstrated this in a court of law. But I have never been convinced by this objection, because it is, in effect, a non sequitur. It assumes that if you are the owner of something in a legal sense, then this is the only relationship you can ever have with it; or, at the very least, ownership is the dominant relationship you have with it. But there is, in fact, little reason for believing this.
Fundamentally, Brenin was not my property; and he was certainly not my pet. He was my brother. Sometimes, and in some respects, he was my younger brother. At those times, and in those respects, I was his guardian; protecting him from a world that he did not understand and that did not trust him. At those times, I had to make decisions about what we were going to do, and enforce the decisions whether or not Brenin consented to them. At this point some of my friends in the animal rights movement will start bleating about unequal power relations and how, since Brenin could not give his consent to my decisions, he was, in effect, my prisoner. But, again, this charge doesn’t seem very plausible. Imagine my brother was human rather than lupine. If he was too young to understand the world, and the consequences of his actions in that world, then I could not simply abandon him to those consequences. As we saw, Koehler championed the dog’s right to the consequences of its actions. I agree; but this right is, of course, not an absolute right. It is what philosophers call a prima facie right: a right that can be overridden in appropriate circumstances. If your dog was about to run out in front of a car, perhaps because it had ignored your instructions, then you would not simply allow it to suffer the consequences of its actions. On the contrary, you would do your best to make sure that it avoided those consequences. And the same would be true if my younger brother were about to run out in front of a car. Within the limitations imposed by common sense and general human decency, when the consequences are not too severe or debilitating, I would allow my younger brother to suffer or enjoy the consequences of his actions, because that is the only way in which he will learn. But in other circumstances, I would have to protect him the best I could, even if he did not consent to this protection. To say that this would make him my prisoner seems to be the result of an overly excitable determination to ignore the distinction between guardianship and imprisonment.
It is the concept of guardianship rather than ownership that seems to provide the most plausible way of understanding the primary relationship between people – at least decent people – and their companion animals. But, with Brenin, this doesn’t quite seem to fit either. This is what distinguished him – decisively – from any dog I have ever known. It was only at some times, and in some circumstances, that Brenin was my younger brother. At other times, and in other circumstances, he was my older brother: a brother that I admired and wanted, above all, to emulate. As we shall see, this was no easy task, and I never achieved more than a fraction of it. But it was the attempt, and the resulting struggle, that forged me. The person I became, I am utterly convinced, is better than the one I would otherwise have been. And nothing more can be asked of an older brother.
There are different ways of remembering. When we think of memory, we overlook what is most important in favour of what is most obvious. A bird does not fly by flapping its wings; this is merely what provides it with forward propulsion. The real principles of flight are to be found in the shape of the bird’s wings, and the resulting differences in the pressure of the air flowing over the upper and lower surfaces of those wings. But in our early attempts to fly, we overlooked what is most important in favour of what is most obvious: we built flapping machines. Our understanding of memory is similar. We think of memory as conscious experiences whereby we recall past events or episodes. Psychologists call this episodic memory.
Episodic memory, I think, is just the flapping of wings, and it is always the first to betray us. Our episodic memory is not particularly reliable at the best of times – decades of psychological research converge on this conclusion – and is the first to fade as our brains begin their long but inexorable descent into indolence, like the flapping of a bird’s wings that gradually fades in the distance.
But there is another, deeper and more important way of remembering: a form of memory that no one ever thought to dignify with a name. This is the memory of a past that has written itself on you, in your character and in the life on which you bring that character to bear. You are not, at least not typically, aware of these memories; often they are not even the sorts of things of which you can be conscious. But they, more than anything else, make you what you are. These memories are exhibited in the decisions you make, the actions you take and the life that you thereby live.
It is in our lives and not, fundamentally, in our conscious experiences that we find the memories of those who are gone. Our consciousness is fickle and not worthy of the task of remembering. The most important way of remembering someone is by being the person they made us – at least in part – and living the life they have helped shape. Sometimes they are not worth remembering. In that case, our most important existential task is to expunge them from the narrative of our lives. But when they are worth remembering, then being someone they have helped fashion and living a life they have helped forge are not only how we remember them; they are how we honour them.
I will always remember my wolf brother.