9
Moral Commitment
Gray Wolves
They say that Wolves avoid anything that has been touched by a human. Even a Moose carcass left as bait, so tempting, so needed in the depth of winter, will be avoided. Perhaps it was layered snow that rendered the trap so invisible to eye and nose that it caught the female Wolf unawares. She was gripped by the steel teeth for two weeks. Her partner remained with her until the trapper came back and shot her dead. After her death, the male traveled fourteen miles back to the natal den. He then began to furiously clean out the burrows that were buried under several feet of snow. The next day, he ran back the fourteen miles to where his love had lain. After a while, he left her and trotted over to a plateau where he sat and began to howl. Over the next two months, the male returned regularly to the death site, even after he had partnered with another female. One day, the male Wolf trekked over twenty miles to return to the trapping site. His new mate could not keep up. Eventually, she left and joined another group. Four months after his beloved’s death, the Wolf continued to make his pilgrimages. In April, he connected with a second new female, but she was killed. He narrowly escaped only to die himself within the week, shot by hunters.
What makes a society—Wolf, human, Penguin, or otherwise—livable and healthy depends on the quality of its moral commitment, the desire to respect and support the wellness and rights of others.1 Moral commitment is a natural, integral part of child raising in companionship cultures.2 Understanding and acquiring a moral sense is not something that you are told or that you think—it is embodied through experience in community.3 Moral commitment must be experienced, because our neuronal systems are shaped by our culture’s values, and values infuse how we live, make decisions, and interact with one another. Our neural connections are literally shaped and wired by our experiences and our natural sense-making of those experiences. They help us discern and evaluate what we know and feel internally relative to the external world.
Adult morals, which coalesce at the societal level, are highly influenced by initial brain wiring of the emotion circuitries that are set in babyhood.4 How an infant is brought into the world and what they experience in the first years of life lay down foundational tracks of who they will be, how they will behave, and what they value in the future and as an adult. From neuroendocrinology and immune function to sociality and morality, the early years of life are strong determinants of adult mental health, physical health, and ethics—and those of society as a whole.5
The first moral commitment that a nested baby experiences is a social engagement ethic. It emerges in the loving presence of carers when a baby is met with reverent hospitality, empathy, ongoing synchrony, and mutual influence.6 On the other hand, if a baby experiences carers who do not demonstrate nestedness and moral commitment, a wedge or gap can develop in the continuum of connection.7 Children raised in unnested care are therefore prone to learn detachment and lack of open-hearted commitment to others because they did not experience moral commitment themselves. While moral commitment can be cultivated later in life with others, such as with a grandparent, these values may not take root as deeply as when habits of mind and heart are built from the ground up.8 This situation is characteristic of settler-colonizing cultures that dim sensory perception and awareness, distancing all from Animal kin so that “self-interest is promoted over the interests of community and the tenor of moral authority has moved from community values to the valorisation of the globalised individual.”9
In Nature-based cultures, however, social engagement ethics are woven into a lifestyle of collective interactions.10 Companionship in these societies nurtures flexible relational attunement, the capacity for engaging in loving interpersonal dances with others, enabling a lifelong ethic to treat others—including nonhumans—with hospitality, respect, and reverence. Social enjoyment and interpersonal enhancement are the coins of daily life.11
Nature-based cultures such as the Maori are imbued with a social engagement ethic that is ecological. An ecological engagement ethic is one where humans “and the world are bound together by ties of kinship and people must accept the associated responsibilities . . . [and that] everything in the universe has its own whakapapa (genealogy), that is part of the unified whole.”12 Life takes place in a Nature-inclusive plural.13 As New Zealand professor of outdoor education Mike Boyes describes it, “We treat the earth with the care and respect we show to a parent and are prepared to be guardians and stewards of it as we are reconnecting with the interdependent nature of our existence.” This “recognition that all things have mauri (life essence)” undergirds respectful relationships. “As individuals, we are spiritually nourished by knowing we have a rightful place on the earth and knowing well the specific places where we belong. Turangawaewae (a place to stand) comes with moral commitments to take full responsibility for the well-being of the features and organisms within that place.”14
Intergenerational, Nature-based ethical resonance sustains Nature’s coherence and well-being. When looking out across a landscape at the fullness of mountains, expansive grasslands, and endless skies, we experience Nature’s moral commitment to us in the generosity of her gifts and in the peace and coherence we feel. The same sense of peace and moral coherence comes from following Nature’s evolved nest patterns and processes.15 These patterns of ecological and moral shaping are found among every species, no matter their lifestyle. While most people are open to accepting that Animals such as the herbivorous Elephant possess a sense of morality, they are less apt to extend this understanding to Bears and Wolves. But, as we have previously witnessed, the true nature of Nature is often hidden by layers of human projections, and Gray Wolves are no exception.
In the form of one subspecies or another, Wolves have lived interleaved in human cultures for thousands of years throughout Europe, North America, most of Asia, and Africa’s north. Many cultures identify Wolves as part of their heritage. The Celtic high king Cormac mac Airt, who was said to have been raised by a mother Wolf, is one example; the Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan, are another. The Ainu attribute the willingness of Wolves to help humans in distress to an ancestral White Wolf–goddess union. We find similar respect in Egypt, where the venerated deity Anubis is not a Jackal, as previously assumed before DNA analyses, but a Wolf.16
These positive cultural narratives clash with popular European and conquest North American stories told ’round the campfire and bedsides of wide-eyed children on wind-torn nights, depicting helpless Red Riding Hoods, hapless Pigs, and princesses at the mercy of menacing Wolves. Wolves in Europe and settler-colonial North America were, and still are, typically stereotyped as aggressive, competitive, vicious, and incapable of empathy for anyone but their mate or pup. When scientific and historical data are examined, however, Wolf-on-human aggression is almost nonexistent. Unprovoked attacks on humans by Wolves are extremely rare, with most committed by rabies-infected individuals.17
Seasoned scientists—such as Gordon Haber, who spent a half century with Alaska’s Denali Wolves—describe a very different character, one threaded with themes of care and kin. Haber describes Wolf society this way: “A group of wolves is not a snarling aggregation of fighting beasts, each bent on fending only for itself, but a highly organized group of related individuals or family units, all working together in a remarkably amiable, efficient manner.”18 As this chapter’s epigraph—adapted from Haber’s observations—illustrates, Wolves form deep, emotional bonds and display intense grief when their mate or other family member dies.19
Much of the bias against Wolves comes from Europeans and settler-colonizers who saw Wolves as formidable competitors and challengers to human supremacy, an attitude that was fortified by the Christian Bible, which associates Wolves with evil.20 The Wolf’s propensity to eat other Animals, like other obligate carnivores, also has something to do with it. Wolves, however, are not that different from herbivores. Just as groups of Wolves eat Moose and Elk, groups of Elephants and Elands consume savanna Grasses. The main difference is that while herbivores travel to find their meals, they don’t have to hunt them down, nor do they require help from family and friends in order to eat. Elephant nourishment is stationary, found beneath their feet or in the architecture of a Tree. An Elephant family may rely on elder wisdom to find water and food, but it does not take an entire family to secure a mouthful of Grass. Wolves also rely on matriarchal knowledge, yet in most cases they must partner with family members to achieve nourishment.21
Wolves have to search for, locate, and then catch moving food. Unless the meal is smaller than a Deer, the endeavor requires participation by the entire group. Wolf bodies, minds, and social organization have evolved for this purpose. Sighting, stalking, and taking down an individual, such as a Moose, is a formidable task that demands intricately choreographed physical, mental, and communicative prowess to succeed. Only approximately 5 percent of Wolf-on-Moose hunts in winter result in a successful kill.22 Much like the evolved nest practices of our human ancestors and other Animals, an individual Wolf works with and for the many of her group.
Rick McIntyre, who has studied Yellowstone Wolves in detail for almost thirty years—including fifteen summers spent in Alaska and three in Glacier National Park—recounts a story of how a family of Wolves stole an Elk body from two young Grizzlies.23 The two young Bears were likely siblings who had recently emerged from hibernation in need of calorie-rich sustenance. When the Wolf family spotted the young Bears at the Elk carcass, the family “worked as a team: two charged at the bears and drove them away from the calf while another ran to the carcass. The bears turned around and ran at the two wolves behind them. One swatted at a wolf with a front paw, but missed. Unable to deal with the harassment, the young bears left the area, and the five wolves took over the kill.”24
Hunting is serious business exercised with parsimony.25 When hunting is not required, carnivores and omnivores generally follow a “live and let live” policy. Haber relates, “I’ve seen moose and caribou walk right through or near a homesite with wolves present but flaked out in the daytime heat. In one case a cow moose nearly stepped on a resting Savage River wolf, but moose and wolf ignored each other.”26 Charlie Russell, who lived immersed in Grizzly and Brown Bear societies, witnessed how harming and killing in the wild functions on a must-need basis. Carnivores operate on a “I won’t hunt you when I am not hungry” ethic.27 Even European explorers, who came from countries that regarded Wolves as terrifying enemies to be persecuted and hunted down without question, were astonished when they saw Indigenous tribes, such as the Ohlone of Turtle Island, living peaceably alongside carnivores.28
Wolf families are well-disciplined and are generally headed by a female and her mate in a supportive leadership role (frequently referred to by biologists as an “alpha” pair). Finding food is a priority, but at its heart, the task is driven by the imperative to maintain protection and care for the group and their young.29 Raising children is Wolf social glue.30
The Gray Wolf evolved nest is a social, emotional, and physical compound comprising an extended family and an associated area or territory as large as a thousand square miles.31 The extent and definition of a viable territory depends on multiple factors, including group size, number and proximity to other Wolf families, food abundance, and availability of adequate denning sites, water, and cover, most of which vary with climate and circumstance. As Haber notes from his observations and those of Adolph Murie, which together span nearly a century: “Complex systems such as wolf societies can be expected to behave in counterintuitive, nonlinear ways, with lags and discontinuities.”32 This implies that, ideally, a territory has enough spatial flexibility to accommodate change and allow Wolves to move fluidly to obtain what they need.
In most places, however, Wolves’ ability to move with Nature’s metabolism has been eliminated. Yellowstone National Park, for example, is home to ten Wolf groups in thirty-five thousand square miles, which means it can get “crowded.” Also, unlike modern humans, Wildlife cannot be held to jurisdictional boundaries. They have to make a living in a dynamic landscape. The unwillingness to recognize even science’s logic has created enormous pressure and challenges for Wolves. Even though Yellowstone Wolves have been protected since being reintroduced to the park, if any of them leave the park they are considered fair hunting game. In 2021 twenty-five Wolves (20 percent of the Yellowstone population) were killed because they strayed outside the narrow bounds of the park.33 All of these dangers and restrictions trickle down into family functions.
In precolonial, preslaughter settings, a mother Wolf in Alaska bears her young in the communal den in May, after two months’ gestation. In the more temperate Yellowstone, this happens in April. Pups remain within the den area for about five months. Similar to Beaver lodges, Wolf dens are part of a burrow-and-chamber complex that can reach twenty to thirty feet in length. The homesite complex is not limited to the underground. Aboveground, there is a well-laid-out design, including places where the young can play in safety and freedom, bed areas for resting, and lookouts for spotting danger. Strategically placed in hillsides and near streams, the honeycomb of homesites is often arrayed in clusters to facilitate family and interfamily connection and communication. The overall space, which can encompass up to thirty or more acres,34 accommodates a meeting ground where the entire community can gather.35 Some complexes are estimated to be a century or two old, a testimony to an ancient tradition and well-developed culture.36
Culture is not limited to the creation of cathedrals, paintings, and concerti. At its core, culture embodies attitudes, philosophy, values, and ontologies generated and processed by ancestry, all of which inform morality. A nested culture is one that nurtures flexible capacities that cultivate a lifelong engagement ethic. Central to Nature-based cultures is the interstitial transmission of values and learning through brains, behaviors, and consciousnesses that are morally committed to community well-being. Haber notes that the Wolf “basic social framework is programmed in the genes, but important details are ‘tuned’ via learning to fit available resources . . . thus providing the society with much flexibility and adaptability. These details are so adaptable that they last for generations—families therefore develop traditions. The result of this collection of traditions can be viewed as culture.”37 It is within this space that the body and mind of a young Wolf is planted and grows.
Prior to birthing and for subsequent months, Wolf family members remain close to the homesite, interrupted only by foraging outings.
There is a group effort in raising and training [the young], the cooperative effort of many. In these and other respects, wolves, like our own human ancestors, have developed a highly effective means of coping with a wide variety of ecological conditions. . . . Life within a family group, which in most cases is an extended family of pups, parents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins, including even newcomers, is replete with ceremonies, divisions of labor, and other variations in behavior that adapt them to a variety of changing conditions.
As an example, one male Wolf stayed with the lead couple, even during their courtship and mating, and continued to remain close to help prepare the den for birthing. He effectively “performed the major duties of fatherhood,” and, Haber concludes, “virtually all family members help the parents,” which makes it “largely meaningless to distinguish between parent and nonparents at this time of year.”38 These relationships make up the ethical architecture of family group function, variously attended by mother, father, yearlings, and other members of the family.39 Young developing brains map these experiences, which are rooted in cultural practices.
After birth, every infant, human and Wolf, begins an intensive and rapid journey of development. Baby brains are self-organizing systems initially governed by the brain stem and limbic system, both of which guide cognitive growth but are shaped by experience.40 The quality of early relationships that a baby experiences also relates to one kind of quantity: the number of neuronal connections the baby develops. Every species has its own timetable of rapid brain development, which in altricial species is largely associated with the period of nursing and dependent care.
During the critical time from human conception to about six years of age, synapses—information bridges between neurons—are created at a faster rate than at any other time in the life span.41 Between bursts of neuronal production, synapses undergo “pruning”: elimination of unneeded connections. This process continues through the third decade of life.42 An infant’s experiences determine what is not needed and results in the pruning of excess synapses. The initial overabundance of synapses, however, is not for naught; that would go against Nature’s waste-not-want-not parsimony. Pruning is best viewed as a process of shaping a child’s internal map to match and align with those around them. A baby’s neural spring “bloom” readies them for postnatal experience. Babies of all species are acutely sensitive to what they experience. Spring blooms and successive pruning are designed to optimize a baby’s ability to come into limbic resonance and develop mutual empathy with those they experience in the moment. Neural and behavioral plasticity is an ingenious way of shaping a baby to fit into the precise environment in which they live.
Moment by moment, loving reactions and responses that are experienced with and promoted by the caregiver are foundational for seeding a social engagement ethic, an egalitarian, socially responsive, and flexible orientation.43 The engagement ethic is dependent on developmentally appropriate care during infancy and childhood because the systems underlying it are epigenetically molded, requiring co-construction by experience that fosters the circuitries in the brain necessary for sociality, largely dependent on right hemisphere development.
Practices of the evolved nest foster species-normal moral development.44 Sensory experience builds patterns of importance and differentiation, shaping attention, orientation, and the child’s perceptual and experiential capacities according to their culture.45 The culture of Homo sapiens-amans amans will shape a different being from the culture of Homo sapiens-amans aggressans or arrogans. The experienced patterns engrave upon the child a set of moral values—a habitus, “a history turned into nature”—that is carried forward into life.46 “The characteristic ways in which one is led to focus on and attend to others can become directly incorporated into individual systems of experiencing and organizing the world” as selfways.47 It is only certain human cultures that have denied their young nested care, violated Nature’s patterns, and undermined species-normal social and moral development.
As the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences studies have shown, when early care is toxic and traumatic, psychophysiological systems that undergird social and moral development are constrained, leading to a limited capacity for positive social engagement. Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud intuited correctly what neurobiologists would ascertain a century later when he asserted that his patients’ psychological problems were physiological footprints of past experiences.48
Infants who experience routine stress and adversity are compelled to put their energies into surviving instead of growing according to naturally scheduled developmental needs. As Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté note: “Down to the very cellular level, human beings are either in defensive mode or in growth mode, but they cannot be in both at the same time.”49 In these cases, as a child matures, they are likely to react to social encounters with self-protection rather than openness and empathy.50 Negative associations and memories experienced during early development can lead to a proliferation of negative attitudes and diminished empathetic capacities in adulthood.51 Illness is more likely,52 and without the moral threads that make up the evolved nest, children do not acquire a sense of social or ecological responsibility. Their sense of self is not only limited; it is disconnected from life-enhancing opportunities.
A baby’s sense of self begins before birth in relationship, in their mother’s womb, with or without an eggshell. An individual self-system is part of the continuity of being, gradually refined by the responsiveness of the baby’s carers. Self is only known in relation to others. For 25 percent of their natural life span, young Wolves are dependent on adults.53 Self-development involves processes embedded in the presence and context of many. This reflects, as Gordon Haber notes, “one of the hallmarks of an advanced society: prolonged dependency (or neoteny) of the young enables the society to transfer large stores of accumulated past learning to each new generation.”54 Wolf mothers and carers create a relational field of holistic support through touch and caresses—a womb of spirit through embodied love. Within this sensed knowing of safety and belonging, children build the confidence and resources to show themselves to the world and grow with assurance that their basic needs will be met.
Being present to the baby from the first awareness of their existence in the womb to moments immediately after birth is vital for developing compassionate morality.55 Companionship caring fosters a full, healthy sense of self and self-in-relation-to-others, including the nonhuman, which includes an understanding of autonomy with responsibility.56 Carer nurturance maintains the continuity of self-and-others by bridging the shift from womb to world.
Transitioning from union inside the mother to separation outside her requires nested support to prevent feelings of vulnerability or loneliness. Without safe birthing followed by the constant safety of nestedness, a child may withdraw into a self-protective psychophysiological shell, stunted by fear, deprivation, and even despair. Continual assurance of security ensures a child’s innate affinity for connection and exploration, companionship ethics flourish, and a promising life story begins.
Self-development is an embodied experience of being and existing that expands over time. Through active, positive participation in interpersonal experiences, a child develops diverse aspects of selfhood, including autonomy, freedom, self-consciousness, and moral responsibility. Their selfhood journey begins with a protoself, a first coherent sense of being.57 A core self, a sense of self-as-body, is fostered by the synchrony of action with affectionate carers during social play, feeding, and snuggling.58 In time, an autobiographical self59 nucleates through the knitting together of diverse, discrete events and experiences into a coherent narrative.60
Neurobiologically, the periaqueductal gray medial frontal cortical areas work with the reticular activating system—a set of brain stem nerve pathways connecting the spinal cord, cerebrum, and cerebellum61—to form a network that functions as a critical source of awareness, blending cognition and emotion.62 These systems have evolved to develop properly through the experiences of nestedness.
The protoself and core self form what we might call a minimal self, or multiple minimal selves as they change, situation by situation. An extended consciousness knits together and brings coherence to the diverse sets of minimal selves experienced minute by minute, day by day. Processes such as interoception are performed by a minimal self in the moment, and they serve as intermediaries between the environment and the actions the youngling exerts in interactions. Over time, core self-development threads together a sense of being across past, present, and future, creating a fuller sense of self.
In the technoindustrial urbanized world, it is easy to forget how we are integral to the ecologies in which we have evolved. Humans, Beavers, Parrots, and Wolves are born into an ecology, an evolutionary environment that has coevolved with previous generations and coevolves with us as we live. Wolf, human, and Penguin ancestral senses of self are experienced by and characterize an individual, but one whose identity extends beyond the singular. It is a diffuse self, an eco-self, inclusive and reflective of the context—social and ecological—in which a child develops. With a diffuse self, instead of a static self that hobbles consciousness through greater and greater efforts to establish one’s separate merit and existence, an individual is able to stay floating in heart-mind, the coupling of sensory experience and feeling, deeply connected to the whole of Nature, a common self of existence.63
With the building blocks of relational attunement, the natural inclination and desire to fit in Nature (sensu Russell) are seeded.64 Early life sets up an empathic universe for the self, empathic effectivity roots, which constitute unconscious procedural knowledge about emotional connection to and awareness of effects on others.65 The nested individual operates as a hub of many selves with whom she is joined and with whom she shares a mutual ethic. There is no being without shared social relations—one lives with others in mind.66 Every detail of Wolf family dynamics and baby care reflects this understanding, philosophy, and practice. The Wolf natal space is filled with responsive nursing, nuzzling, and play laced with learning the nuanced ways of Wolf etiquette and wisdom. Pleasurable and joyful intersubjective attunement brings limbic resonance into relational communion. One way this natural bond is reinforced is through touch and grooming, which older Wolves provide to their pups.67 Play is another.
As Beaver cultures beautifully demonstrate, play is a practice ground for learning body knowledge, ethics, and interpersonal skill sets; at the same time, play lays down neural networks of joy, culture, and love. As young Wolves mature, older Wolves, often yearling siblings, accompany them on “puppy walks” to “rendezvous sites” in the complex, where exploration can be undertaken in safety. In August and September, the final days of the five-month homestay, young Wolves experience a threshold event affecting self-development: they leave the natal compound with their families and step into the open world.
Infant Wolves, like the infants raised by our human nomadic-foraging ancestors, emerge from and into wholeness. They are part of an intricate tapestry woven by minds and lives into the ecology, experienced and transmitted over millions of years. Evolutionary developmental biology, the study of how organism development evolves, emphasizes this intermingled, purposeful organization within an organism that is informed by multitudinous processes and actors in space and time. Our becomings, our worldings, are intertwined. Self-development, also called autopoiesis, of various physiological systems is partnered with a relational world of sympoiesis, communal co-development.68 Self-development does not occur in a void.
By definition, it unfolds in a relational world of sympoietic entanglement. While humans may sometimes feel alone, isolated in our individual bodies, such separation is an illusion. We are not alone. We do not live alone. We become-with others, developing, growing, and living symbiotically, in companionship. They cocreate us in sympoietic entanglement. For example, each individual is populated with trillions of bacteria and fungi that comprise that person’s microbiome. We are host of and are hosted by many other species inside, on, and outside our bodies.69 As Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela say, “We have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps us bring it forth.”70 The tree of life, as Charles Darwin described, is layered with sexual, parental, and social instincts, all of which lead to a moral sense.71 Returning to our ancestral Homo sapiens-amans amans heritage begins with the biology of love in early life and the ethic of ecological engagement with all others in our world. Baby, carers, and ecology are partnered.
Each species evolved to want and require particular physical and psychological resources that their evolved nest provides. American psychologist Abraham Maslow identified several basic needs and ordered them in a pyramidal hierarchy.72 But infants require them all, and more,73 for physical and psychological support.74 The provision of basic needs for self-actualization, and how and when they are provided, are the rain, sun, and soil nurturance required for healthy infant development. Nestedness evolved for this very purpose—to provide the buffering for any set of genetic components to ensure optimal conditions for development.
If, however, babies are not welcomed into the world, they do not intuit or feel a social multiverse. Unnestedness ungrounds children from ancestor-normative organization of the protoself. Self-development, self-esteem, self-agency, and self-fidelity are undermined.75 This is especially visible in neglected or physically or sexually abused human children, who are generally less likely to develop a positive sense of self and can become detached from and unaware of their feelings.76 Instead, a “false self” may be created as a shield against a perceived threatening environment.77 One’s true self may become buried and obscured under layers of false selves, thereby creating disorientation and a distorted sense of morality. A child can become separated from and unreceptive to a balanced flow of attunement and support, leading to an inner feeling of emptiness that reflects the vacuum of unresponsive care experienced during critical phases of self-development.78 Nested care obviates these externally driven internal splits.79
Despite the social, emotional, and practical tuning provided by nested care, young Animals and humans are on a steep learning curve when they enter the world in which they will live as adults. In the case of young Wolves, there is a marked shift when, after spending five months at or in proximity to the natal den, they leave with their families to take part in the broader environment. Many show fearfulness when confronted with the vast newness. There is a wealth of novel, and sometimes, confusing, smells, sounds, tastes, and encounters. Young Wolves are charged with learning essential skills: how to cross a river safely, how to stalk a Moose, proper responses to Bears and humans, how to find the way home to the den, and so on.80 They enter a surround of distinct polyphonic voices in the ecology they traverse.81 All this, however, occurs within the embrace of the Wolf family group.
As they grow, young Wolves, like nested human children, are busy problem-solving, building and integrating self-body-mind. They are always in relationship and accompanied, whether by each other, mother, father, other elders, yearlings who have transitioned from complete dependence to partial independence, or the surrounding ever-changing ecology. Soon, by winter, young Wolves settle into apprenticeship.
Some of the most challenging and important lessons revolve around finding and catching food. Developing keen hunting skills is imperative. A lot is at stake. Hunting requires tremendous expenditure of energy, and any brash, unthoughtful action can lead to injury, which, in the wild, is often fatal. Subsequently, before any pursuit can be launched, all manner of factors need to be weighed. Not all Moose and Caribou are the same, and individual states and circumstances influence the hunt outcome. An experienced Wolf has developed hunting acumen and emotional intelligence for this purpose. Relative to their elders, young Wolves often take extra time when testing the suitability of a Moose or Caribou as a candidate for pursuit. In this learning phase, young Wolves frequently “overreact,” for example, by misjudging how fast and clever a Raven is. After chasing a Raven to near exhaustion, they often end up unsuccessful, with no Raven prize in hand.82 The youngsters are still “in school” for good reason.
Errors in judgment—along with successes—are processes and experiences that refine self-regulation and self-knowledge that began with early, responsive care. By the time they are yearlings, young Wolves have developed a much deeper sense of self, competence, and relational understanding that enable them to join the group more fully. Learning and self-development continue throughout life and are always exercised in relationship. Developing independence is not the same as individuality. A Wolf self is always relationally defined. Everything about Wolves—hunting, child-rearing, sharing knowledge, and allocare—is communal and cooperative.
Finally, after two or so years, when they near sexual maturity, a young Wolf has come into self-perception as a whole being, sympoietically with full participation in the group—that is, with self-organized social, psychological, and physical systems in an entangled “making with” others.83 Similar to Nature-based human cultures, Wolf days and lives unfold communally. Everyone contributes in accordance to what is needed and when. When, for example, there is a need for a mother’s exceptional tracking skills, artfully coordinated with her male partner and the rest of the group, others step in to help out. This “frees the mother, who is generally a more experienced hunter than any of the young helpers, to join the hunt.”84 Similar to Sperm Whales, Wolf nursing is provided by other mothers or childless females who begin to lactate so that “mothers nurse each other’s pups interchangeably . . . [and] nonmothers also lactate, sometimes even one-year-olds.”85 When young Wolves begin to wean, an elder Wolf will return with regurgitated food, gifts that include fleshy morsels and body parts for the young Wolves to gnaw and feed on.
Unnested care is not found among nonhuman Animals unless they have been traumatized by human activities.86 In parallel with their Earthcentric human neighbors, Wolves have suffered severe trauma and loss of elder wisdom. Multigenerational cords of Wolf companionship cultures have been severed and family cohesion destroyed by pernicious European and settler-colonizer mass killings. The footprint of historical trauma suffered by Indigenous peoples is echoed in Wolf cultural biographies.
By the mid-1900s, US government extermination programs had eliminated Wolves in the lower forty-eight American states, with the exception of small, isolated pockets in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.87 The Gray Wolf was “pursued with more determination than any other animal in United States history.”88 Until hunting resumed outside Yellowstone Park, Wolf-on-Wolf fatalities, including intraspecific, intrafamilial killing of adults and pups as well as incidents of intense intergroup attacks and killings, were the number one cause of death among Yellowstone Wolves.89 Such incidents and behaviors appear to contrast with Denali Wolves in Alaska, who are reported as an extremely prosocial society with an absence of intraspecific violence.90
Unlike the Denali Wolves, who, until recently, have been relatively “unexploited” and able to maintain their traditions and culture intact,91 the Yellowstone Wolves have experienced a history of violence. The reintroduced Yellowstone Wolves are not all related; they were imported from Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, where populations sustained intensive hunting. The reintroduction program involved further traumas: capture, crating, and being transported to the park, where they went through a period of captivity in acclimatization pens. The Wolves were finally released but were psychologically and physically vulnerable. They found themselves in a completely unfamiliar area, with no local ecological knowledge and not knowing if other Wolves were present. The next year another group of Wolves was reintroduced, with no prior history with or relationship to the first group.92
All of these events and circumstances took Yellowstone Wolves far outside the realm of nested care and historically normative Wolf culture. Neuropsychology predicts that the signature of these traumatic events would emerge intergenerationally. According to psychological criteria, the reintroduced Wolves are candidates for a diagnosis of complex PTSD (like the young male Elephants who also suffered a series of profound traumas). In contrast with what Haber described among Denali Wolves, Yellowstone Wolves have exhibited intraspecific aggression, infanticide, and asociality.93 A description of systematic Wolf killing—which is still in effect outside the park and elsewhere, and which nearly extinguished the species in the United States—reads as being nearly identical to what happened to the Elephants:94 “Picture a family group of wolves, parents, current pups, earlier offspring—together in the hills interacting in all their ebullient, highly advanced ways. Then imagine the scene transformed into panic and chaos as one or two planes suddenly appear just over a nearby ridge and, in a blast of blowing snow, swoop down ten feet over the wolves. One by one, wolves are targeted and chased to exhaustion. As they flee, they fall head over heels in the snow, crash head-first into trees, and attempt to hide in thick brush. The gunner leans out of the plane and shoots wolves, killing some, but not all, of this family of wolves, leaving the rest—often the younger, less experienced wolves—to fend for themselves.”95 Life has continued to change for Alaskan Wolves, and those elsewhere, with the proliferation of hunting and trapping. It can no longer be claimed that Wolves are unexploited.96
The individual Wolf is a constellation in form, mind, and purpose. All of the dramas of life—joyful, frightening, exhilarating, sorrowful—are shared. Wolves demonstrate this through speech, touch, work, and play with each other and how they monitor each other’s states of minds and wellness. Their repertoire of howls and calls keep them in near-constant touch and fortify cohesion. Much of this social and ecological unity is invisible to modern human eyes. At times, however, Nature’s heartbeat breaks through even the most conditioned mind.
In 2009, when Gordon Haber’s plane crashed into an Alaskan mountainside, the Wolves knew that their colleague, companion, and champion had died. Friends of Haber’s who were hiking in the vicinity of the crash, unaware of the accident and Haber’s death, suddenly heard a chorus of Wolf howling of a strength and length they had never heard during their twenty-five years of residence in Alaska.97 Though Haber was human, the Wolves had grown to know him as a friend, as one in the many and the many in the one of Wolves.