News, Winter 2009/2010, page 3

Volunteer of the Quarter - Barbara English

Centerfold - Shaman

In Memory of Gina

Exactly twelve hours after we discovered Shaman’s passing, we found Gina in distress. She was in the lower section of her habitat, unable to use her hind legs. There would be no time for grieving our other friend’s departure this morning. Even after a sorrow-filled night of little sleep, everyone was quick to spring into action. Medical emergencies are far from pleasant events at the Sanctuary, but the Wolf staff is well prepared and everyone knows their tasks. The animal transport truck was moved in front of Gina’s habitat. Even with only the use of her front legs, Gina was avoiding the humans with a quickness no one expected. However, she quickly was caught up, placed into one of our wolf-proof travel kennels, and loaded into the truck in under ten minutes. Her medical file along with the Sanctuary’s other emergency odds and ends were already in the truck and we departed for the emergency veterinary hospital.

We didn’t really know a great deal about Gina. The intimate knowledge of her life was lost when the back yard breeder, who kept her on a chain most of her life, passed away. The things we did know were limited. Her estimated age was just over 12 years. She was afraid of humans, but was slowly allowing caretakers to get closer to her. With a medical exam, we learned the tips of her ears were gone from frostbite. She had likely given birth to many litters of puppies and her favorite pastime was engaging in dominance displays through the fence with her neighbor, Luna. Gina was part of the 2006 rescue from Wisconsin, the “Wide Awake” rescue. Given what she had gone through in her life, this girl was tough as nails.

As we arrived at the veterinary hospital, the staff immediately remembered Gina. She had gone through another emergency earlier in the year with a uterine infection. Their recollection added a little bit of brightness to the morning, as the Sanctuary had recently changed vet hospitals. Heartfelt compassion and remembrance was a welcome change. Gina was moved into an exam room and given a full checkup as well as a neurological workup. Her stress level throughout the entire day remained very low, even through all the poking and prodding she had to endure, an amazing feat for one of the Sanctuary’s no-contact animals. More exams and a series of x-rays came next, then the wait as a radiologist reviewed the x-rays and all the pieces were put together. Gina took the wait well, she had happily perched herself on the x-ray table. She kept her front legs spread apart as wide as she could, ensuring no one was going to roll her onto her side or her back again.


The diagnosis that came back was far from what we hoped it might have been. Without expensive imaging such as an MRI or CT-Scan, Gina’s condition could only be narrowed to three possibilities. She had a clot blocking her spinal nerves, a slipped spinal disk pinching her spinal column, or a rapidly growing tumor pressing against her spine. The first of the three was the only one with a potential treatment option, given the realities of spinal surgery and recovery restrictions for a mostly wild and unsocial animal. Gina was given an injection of an anti-inflammatory steroid and a course of medication to follow. If she did not show improvement in three days time, her chances of recovering the use of her hind legs was almost nonexistent. We brought Gina back home, setting her up with accommodations in the main cabin at the Sanctuary. Through the night Gina, in the cabin, and her companion Hammer, in their habitat howled back and forth. Each of them happy the other was alright, but saddened to not be together. As the days passed, we painfully watched Gina’s paralysis worsen, taking effect on her internal systems as well. With her growing complications and our heavy hearts, we knew it was time. Gina passed away, with assistance, on the evening of September 30th. We placed her into her habitat for the night, with her companion Hammer, hoping to provide him with some closure and understanding of his loss of a friend. Gina will be missed by us all.

Who Domesticated Whom?

Anyone who has had a personal and open-minded relationship with their dog is aware of how deep these connections can be. In our case, having the opportunity to have relationships with wolves and actually be a part of their pack leaves us marveling at their intelligence, ingenuity, emotional depth, sense of fairness, social bonds, loyalty, playfulness and general friendly nature. As scientists learn more about our history with canines, they are formulating new theories on what most likely occurred. Some of these theories would suggest what we have felt in our experiences -- wolves have many wonderful traits from which we can learn, if we can keep our minds open. Below are excerpts from several publications, which explain this concept very nicely. The full text of the publication by Schleidt/Shalter is 16 pages long and well worth the read. If you would like to find the entire publication, it is online or email us and we will be happy to send you the link or pdf. (click here to download the pdf) The excerpt from Temple Grandin (Professor at CSU) explains the concept in summary form. Temple visited Wolf a few years ago and was great with the animals. (click here to read more about "Animals In Translation")

(an excerpt from: Schleidt, W. M., Shalter, M. D., 2003, “Co-Evolution of Humans and Canids: An Alternative View of Dog Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus?”, Evolution and Cognition 9(1): 57-72) The oldest remains of dogs, of a canid distinctly different from wolves, in the context of human activity are dated about 14,000 years BP [Before Present], long before any trace of domesticated goats, sheep, and cattle (BENECKE 1995; SABLIN/KHLOPACHEV 2002). Thus, there is little argument that dogs are the oldest domesticated animal (ZEUNER 1963; SERPELL 1995). A word of caution, however; what do we mean by “domesticated”? In a most general sense: “no longer in its wild or natural state.” But, were our own ancestors back then, long before they built permanent houses for themselves, less “wild” than the wolves they associated with? While canids are known to dig their own dens, and some of such dens may have been used by many generations, even over hundreds of years (THOMAS 1993), humans are apparently the only primates to make use of caves, and their association with dogs predates the construction of permanent houses by thousands of years. Is it not absurd to talk about the “domestication” of dogs by humans who had not yet any permanent domiciles (“domus”)?

(an excerpt from: “Animals In Translation” by Temple Grandin) Thinking About What Animals Can Do, Not What They Can’t (pages 303 – 306)

I hope we’ll start to think more about what animals can do, and less about what they can’t. It’s important, because we’ve gotten too far away from the animals who should be our partners in life, not just pets or objects of study. You always hear that humans domesticated animals, that we turned wolves into dogs. But new research shows that wolves probably domesticated people, too. Humans co-evolved with wolves; we changed them and they changed us.

The story of how researchers have begun to piece this together is an example of converging lines of evidence, which is what happens when findings from different fields start to fit together and all point in the same direction. For a long time, the best evidence researchers had about when and how wolves turned into dogs came from archaeological discoveries of dog remains that had been carefully buried underneath humans’ huts. Some archaeologists found dogs and people buried together in the same grave.

Those first buried dogs date back about 14,000 years. Humans had not yet invented farming at that time, but they had the same bodies and brains we do. So it made sense to conclude that primitive humans evolved into modern humans first, then began to associate with wild wolves who subsequently evolved into the domestic dog, in order to serve as working dogs and pets.

But a study by Robert K. Wayne and his colleagues at UCLA of DNA variability in dogs found that dogs had to have diverged from wolves as a separate population 135,000 years ago.11 The reason the fossil record doesn’t show any dogs with humans before 14,000 years ago is probably that before then people were partnered with wolves, or with wolves that were evolving into dogs. Sure enough, fossil records do show lots of wolf bones close to human bones before 100,000 years ago.

If Dr. Wayne is right, wolves and people were together at the point when homo sapiens had just barely evolved from homo erectus. When wolves and humans first joined together people only had a few rough tools to their name, and they lived in very small nomadic bands that probably weren’t any more socially complicated than a band of chimpanzees. Some researchers think these early humans may not even have had language.

This means that when wolves and people first started keeping company they were on a lot more equal footing than dogs and people are today. Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since. Going over all the evidence, a group of Austrian anthropologists believes that during all those years when early humans were associating with wolves they learned to act and think like wolves.12 Wolves hunted in groups; humans didn’t. Wolves had complex social structures; humans didn’t. Wolves had loyal same-sex and nonkin friendships; humans probably didn’t, judging by the lack of same-sex and nonkin friendships in every other primate species today. (The main relationship for chimpanzees is parent-child.) Wolves were highly territorial; humans probably weren’t -- again, judging by how nonterritorial all other primates are today.

By the time these early people became truly modern, they had learned to do all these wolfie things. When you think about how different we are from other primates, you see how doglike we are. A lot of the things we do that the other primates don’t, are dog things. The Austrian group thinks it was the dogs who showed us how.

They take their line of reasoning even further. Wolves, and then dogs, gave early humans a huge survival advantage, they say, by serving as lookouts and guards, and by making it possible for humans to hunt big game in groups instead of hunting small prey as individuals. Given everything wolves did for early man, dogs were probably a big reason why early man survived and Neanderthals didn’t. Neanderthals didn’t have dogs.

But dogs didn’t just help people stay alive long enough to reproduce. Dogs probably also made it possible for humans to pull ahead of all their primate cousins. Paul Tacon, principal research scientist at the Australian Museum, says that the development of human friendship “was a tremendous survival advantage because that speeds up the exchange of ideas between groups of people.” All cultural evolution is based on cooperation, and humans learned from dogs how to cooperate with people they aren’t related to.13

Maybe the most amazing new finding is that wolves didn’t just teach us a lot of useful new behaviors. Wolves probably also changed the structure of our brains. Fossil records show that whenever a species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller. The horse’s brain shrank by 16 percent; the pig’s brain shrank as much as 34 percent; and the dog’s brain shrank 10 to 30 percent. This probably happened because once humans started to take care of these animals, they no longer needed various brain functions in order to survive. I don’t how what functions they lost, but I do know all domestic animals have reduced fear and anxiety compared to wild animals.

Now archaeologists have discovered that 10,000 years ago, just at the point when humans began to give their dogs formal burials, the human brain began to shrink, too. It shrank by 10 percent, just like the dog’s brain. And what’s interesting is what part of the human brain shrank. In all of the domestic animals the forebrain, which holds the frontal lobes, and the corpus callosum, which is the connecting tissue between the two sides of the brain, shrank. But in humans it was the midbrain, which handles emotions and sensory data, and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell, that got smaller while the corpus callosum and the forebrain stayed pretty much the same. Dog brains and human brains specialized: humans took over the planning and organizing tasks, and dogs took over the sensory tasks. Dogs and people co-evolved and became even better partners, allies, and friends.

Continued -> ->

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