Born Prisoners

In a sprawling wire enclosure behind Terry Jenkins’ home in the Sierra foothills 50 miles north of Sacramento, three wolflike dogs pace warily from one end of a concrete slab to the other. Beneath an oak forest canopy, buzzing cicadas cut through the heavy, hot air like miniature chain saws as Jenkins calls out to Kodiak, Kiska and Corax: “Settle down. Everything’s OK,� she soothes, as the animals dash for cover behind a doghouse, then peer over its roof expectantly. * Jenkins’ tone is tinged with weariness as she turns to a visitor and confides: “I have a good relationship with them, but they aren’t pets. These will be here until they die. Then that will be the end of it. I’ll be through with them.� * The animals are hybrids--part wolf, part dog--the result of well-intentioned but ultimately cruel efforts at tinkering with a species to tame it. The results are creatures with mixed genetic imperatives. And, when people least expect it, the wolf wins out. They are combative with other dogs, fight with humans for dominance in households, even mistake children as prey. In the end, they are all too often penned up with little of the interaction true dogs and wolves alike require. They are chained up or given away, turned loose or put down; or they escape and are shot or poisoned or end up road kill. * The Humane Society of the United States has taken a hard stand against these animals as unpredictable, destructive and rarely trainable. Ten states already have banned breeding and sales of hybrids, while California and other states have restrictions on ownership. But so far, nothing has slowed the birthrate of the animals that sadly have become trophy pets. * Two decades ago, Jenkins was among few in the United States to breed wolf hybrids. Back then, she didn’t understand the tragic end these animals invariably come to as their wildness slams up against human social structures. Or how clashes between romanticized notions and primitive instincts often lead to nightmarish misunderstandings: Children mauled and killed, animals cruelly abused.

Now Jenkins feels partially responsible for unleashing what has become a torrent of these creatures. And as their popularity soars into a full-blown fad--there are at least 300,000 in the United States today, the Humane Society estimates--Jenkins rues the day she ever got involved.

“I carry with me a very personal hell,� says the 42-year-old supervisor at the Folsom City Zoo. “I have many regrets about what I have done, knowing in my heart the tragedy will likely worsen. In the end, the only hope I have of ending the cycle, the only real atonement for my actions I can offer, is in speaking out against the animals I so dearly love.�

Rae Henderson Ott, director of the North American Wolf Assn., calls hybrids the “dark side� of a growing awareness of wild wolves at a time when the latter are being reintroduced to their former ranges in places such as Yellowstone National Park, the upper Midwest and northeastern Arizona.

“Many of us have spent our lives trying to remove the stigma of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ and it’s starting to pay off because people are becoming more appreciative of wolves, and feeling more romantic about them,� she says. “Now, too, unfortunately, some people are turning to hybrids because they are as close as they can get to the real thing.�

“But there is a price to pay,� adds Ott, who recently built a sanctuary near Houston for 15 hybrids found sick and starving at a roadside zoo near there. “If these people got more educated about the animals instead of running off to buy one, they would see that it is oh so wrong.

“[The hybrids] are born to be prisoners. The wolf in them will always long for something they can never have. Freedom.�

*

Hybrids typically don’t survive their third birthday. It took years of heartbreaking disappointment for Jenkins to understand why.

She was 17 years old and living on her parents’ central California farm when she got her first pure wolf--a 20-day-old pup. She gazed upon the fat, yelping blob of fur and beheld an extraordinarily intelligent infant from another world of nature and grace with its own code of ethics.

Jenkins also thought she saw the animal’s future quite clearly. Before long, little Bonnie would slip into an imposing adulthood of fluid, almost mystical beauty. She would flaunt wild freedom in her gait and her huge, pale yellow eyes would peer right into Jenkins’ soul. They would learn to trust each other. Eventually, Bonnie would become another member of the family, even riding shotgun in Jenkins’ old Chevy pickup during outings to the lake, or while running errands in town.

It didn’t turn out that way.

“We were eating dinner and I wondered whether wolves liked cooked meat so I gave her a sliver of liver,� Jenkins recalls. “In an instant, that little ball of fur had crawled up my leg and was, well, wolfing down my plate with terrible growls.�

At 6 weeks old, Bonnie killed her first chicken. When Jenkins tried to take it away, Bonnie charged and growled, prepared to defend the carcass. So alarming was that display of aggression, Jenkins scrapped all hope of ever training her.

When Bonnie hit 6 months, Jenkins realized she was stuck with a snarling, wild and uncontrollable predator that was unusually picky about whom it liked. Still, Jenkins thought she had a solution. “I bred Bonnie with a malamute to produce a litter of wolf hybrids,� she remembers, shaking her head and staring at the floor. “I felt I’d end up with animals that looked like wolves but acted like dogs. What I found out is this: If it looks like a wolf, doggone it, it acts like a wolf.

“Dogs look up to you, but wolves know nothing of the sort. They feel they are your equal. They know it. Housebreaking? Push a wolf pup’s face in a pile of doo-doo and it will run up your arm and try to rearrange your face. Getting into the garbage? In wolf society, it’s fair game. You try and discipline them about it and they wonder why.�

Bonnie’s first litter produced five hybrid puppies, three of which went to new owners. Jenkins never heard from one owner again. One was put down after shredding a toddler’s arm. Another ended up with a breeder after mangling a child’s leg. Jenkins kept a male named Blue for herself and a female named Ruby, who escaped from her pen and was killed on the highway.

Blue was indifferent and dangerous from the start. One day, after three years of constant dominance battles, Jenkins knew she had to destroy him. He had challenged, fought and nearly killed another male that had grown up with him, then stood defiantly on an enclosure platform and glared down at Jenkins as though from a king’s throne. “I knew he would never let me inside the pen again,� she sighs. “I had no choice.�

That was back in the 1970s. Now, as hybrids’ popularity spreads dramatically, Jenkins is among a growing number of hybrid admirers reassessing their devotion.

But the very issues about which Jenkins and others are so adamant--stricter controls and minimum standards for enclosure requirements for the health and safety of the animals and their keepers--strike other owners and breeders as frontal attacks on constitutional freedoms. Some foresee an outright federal ban on hybrids, even rolling euthanasia vans prowling the countryside for any canine bearing wolfish features.

Never mind that the practicality of separating hybrids from their domestic brethren could be nearly as daunting--and volatile--as gun control. After all, no one has yet been been able to isolate reliable DNA markers to distinguish a wolf from a hybrid or even a domestic dog. And what about hybrids that resemble dogs more than wolves?

This much all can agree on: Hybrids are not for everyone and they make lousy pets. Escape artists, they can open doors and gate latches. They require lots of room and, ideally, a diet of raw meat, bones and fur. They aren’t good guard dogs because they don’t bark at strangers. They shed like buffalo and almost always suffer from diarrhea. They are likely to challenge their owners for dominance. They can destroy the interior of a home, urinating to mark the corners of rooms as their domain and shredding curtains and furniture. And hybrid owners can forget about vacations. Who could leave home without worrying about an animal that can leap seven feet high from a standing position and has teeth 2 1/2 inches long?

“My husband and I take separate vacations because there is no one we can trust to keep the pens padlocked and clean--my three hybrids won’t accept newcomers,� laments Colorado poet Anne Connors. “My animals own me, not the other way around. I know every sound they make and what it means. I’m with them all day and all night. I have to be.�

The trouble is that crossing wolves, which have been bred by nature for millions of years to be wild, with dogs, which have been genetically manipulated for at least 12,000 years to serve man, creates a conflict of innate behaviors. When domestic and wild traits clash, learned behavior can be trampled by instinct at any time, regardless of training, says Jenkins, who has handled some 200 wolf hybrids in the past 20 years.

No one doubts, for example, that young hybrids often get along well with children, are even protective of them. But they are also genetically hard-wired to be aggressive when it comes to guarding territory and spotting weaknesses in potential prey and competing pack members. Those attributes, coupled with the fact that a large predator loses its natural caution in captivity, means that a child who trips, cries and struggles to get up might be mistaken for dinner.

Other problems arise from the wolf’s natural tendency to travel at least 50 miles a day and stake out large expanses of pack territory. Since most people can’t afford to give them the space they need, hybrids become stressed and destructive. They often wind up banished to small backyard pens, or they languish on chains. But putting a hybrid in a small pen, experts say, is like keeping a child in a closet.

*

Recent genetic studies have determined that the wolf is the original ancestor of the dog. It took thousands of years of domestication to transform the wild wolf (Canis lupus) into the pet (Canis lupus familiaris).

Breeding dogs back into wolves, however, is relatively new. Some say it started in the 1950s as part of a noble experiment to save wild wolves that were being vanquished by federal land agents and ranchers who saw them as a threat to livestock.

Strange as it sounds, the hope was that if and when the federal government came to realize the ecological importance of preserving a top predator in the food chain, the hybrids would be bred back to eliminate their domestic ancestry and the offspring would be restored to the wilderness.

“These visionaries lacked knowledge of the many intricacies and problems that a selective-breeding program poses in the long term,� says Kent Weber, executive director of Mission: Wolf, a southern Colorado hybrid rescue center. “Nonetheless, others who came across these part-wild, part-domesticated animals became interested and involved, and soon the number of hybrids grew from a few to a few hundred.�

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, wolves and their hybrid cousins caught the attention of nature lovers and a growing number of Americans interested in Native American religions that venerate wolves as “spiritual teachers.�

Now wolf hybrids are trendy canine companions in the rural outskirts of isolated boomtowns such as Reno, Albuquerque, Denver and Sacramento. Prices for hybrid pups can range from $350 to $1,200.

So why do people want them?

Because wolves looked terrific bounding alongside actor Kevin Costner in “Dances With Wolves.� Because some people think “humongous, mean dogs� deter crime, or make excellent symbolic statements about freedom and power in an era of strong anti-federal government sentiment. Or because of the hybrid’s countenance. It’s not the adoring, trusting expression of, say, a poodle, collie or golden retriever. It’s the piercing stare that a wary, intelligent creature uses to size up both enemy and ally.

In Nevada, these qualities make them living emblems of the Sagebrush Rebellion.

“Heck, even the University of Nevada, Reno’s football, baseball and basketball teams are called Wolfpack,� muses Susan Asher, supervisor at the George Whitell Memorial Animal Welfare Center in Sparks, Nev. “People around here with hybrids think they have a piece of the American wilderness living with them. In fact, they live in a suburban tract home with an animal they know little about.�

Striding toward a pen built on a patch of sunburned hardpan, Gassaway introduces a visitor to her “pack�: a huge black male wolf obtained from a beer delivery man whose ex-wife threatened to put it to sleep; a brown female bought from a man who couldn’t get along with it, and the pups she hopes to sell for $600 each.

Chained to a nearby tree is a gray male obtained from a friend after it turned on neighborhood dogs. It was recently blinded after a skirmish with a wild animal. Gassaway turned it loose to roam the surrounding hills, she says, as the wolf follows the sound of her voice with his opaque white eyes.

Gassaway also recalls with a sigh that “I just lost a hybrid named Baby. She’d been shot by ranchers in the past--once with a shotgun, once with a .22 rifle. But on Memorial Day, her lucky star fell. She ran away and never came back.�

To hear Gassaway and Harrison tell it, the daily dominance battles make for some interesting family dynamics. Like many other hybrid handlers, Harrison believes it is crucial to become, in effect, top wolf in the hierarchy. “When this alpha male steps out of bounds,� he says, while roughhousing with the black wolf, “I sit him on his ass, stand over him and growl. It works.�

Once the couple made love in front of the female wolf, who, Gassaway recalls, “was challenging me to be alpha with Craig--she wanted him as a partner. She learned a lesson that day.�

Then there was the day their male and female wolves mated in a Wal-Mart parking lot. “You should have seen the look on people’s faces,� Harrison says with a laugh. “It wasn’t exactly a scene out of National Geographic. We had to wait them out. It took an hour.�

Picking up one of the month-old pups and smothering it with kisses, Gassaway gushes, “I’ll never have a dog again. Why? Because wolves are the sweetest animals in the world. They look right into your eyes and into your soul looking for trust, family and family values.�

“Right,� nods Harrison in agreement. “But hybrids are another story. In hybrids, you’ve got a wolf fighting with a dog in the same skull. It’s like the egomaniacs in the movies who create a misfit in the laboratory that the government has to put down. I think man has bred his vanity and aggressive personality into hybrids. The result is a very shy animal with a powerful bite and cunning. Not a good deal.�

Perhaps. But even they would agree that the 4 1/2-year-old, 120-pound hybrid that spends each day snoozing in the shade of the entrance to a Mexican restaurant across the street from their Country Junction saloon in Fernley, Nev., is an imposing exception.

“He’s part wolf, part husky and real mellow,� says Dan Herrera, manager of Ricos Tacos. “His name is Rock because a lady at the pound I rescued him at two years ago said he was dumb as a rock.

“Not true,� Herrera says, tugging at curls of black hair spilling out from under his brown fedora. “I raised him with my children and trained him every night. . . . I even used to bite his snout, like a wolf would. He became very loyal to me. At first, it’s true that he expressed himself with anger--like the time I took him to a reggae concert and they wouldn’t let him in. I tied him to a tree next to my van. He ripped the rubber bumper of that van to bits.

“But hey, he’s not like that anymore. If I kicked the bucket, he’d lie on my grave and wait for me to come back.�

*

There has never been a documented case of a wild wolf killing a human being in the United States. But canine fatal-attack statistics, compiled by the Humane Society, rank wolf hybrids in sixth place behind malamutes, huskies, shepherds, Rottweilers and pit bulls.

Pit bulls killed 67 people between 1979 and 1994, while hybrids killed 12 people--all of them children--during the same period. But as one state legislative analysis points out, since there are fewer hybrids, their percentage of fatal attacks is higher.

In March, 1989, 5-year-old Angie Nickerson was killed by a 110-pound wolf hybrid shortly after getting off a school bus less than 100 feet from her doorstep in National Mine, Mich. Authorities speculated that the wolf/malamute-mix broke its chain, attacked the child and partially consumed her. The animal was shot to death by police.

“All I want is for the breeding to stop, and I will fight for that until I take my last breath,� says the little girl’s mother, Patti Nickerson, 36, who is spearheading a bill in Michigan to curb ownership of hybrids. “I’m appalled that people are mixing wolves and dogs. And what for? Money and ego. It’s despicable! The animal that killed my daughter was a freak. The dog side didn’t fear people. The wolf side was a high-strung stalker. Put those things together and you had a schizophrenic monster.�

In 1990, a month-old infant in Alaska died of extensive skull fractures after being bitten in the head by a pregnant hybrid. The infant’s mother reportedly held the baby near the wolf. It was the third attack in Alaska in less than four weeks that year. A week earlier, a 4-year-old’s arm was broken after he ventured too close to the chained hybrid that attacked him. A few weeks before that, a 4-year-old girl was mauled by a chained hybrid that tore her scalp.

Last December, a Black Forest, Colo., woman became the first adult to have been killed by hybrids. A male weighing about 175 pounds and a female that weighed at least 125 pounds had leaped their pen’s six-foot-high fence and attacked Debbie K. Edmonds, 39, as she got out of her car, authorities said. Her sons, 13 and 10, threw rocks at the dogs and shot them with a BB gun to no avail. The boys watched in horror as their mother was dragged a quarter-mile from their driveway.

These attacks may have as much to do with the hybrid’s strength and unstable nature as how they are kept in captivity. Definitely not for the inexperienced, most hybrid handlers agree that these animals require far more time, effort, patience and space than domestic dogs.

That, plus the fact that there has been no research done to find a legally acceptable rabies vaccination for wolf hybrids, has already moved Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Wyoming to ban the sale of these animals.

This year, South Dakota and Michigan are considering bans. In February, the Colorado Legislature, prompted in part by the death of Edmonds, approved a one-year study of hybrids to determine what, if any, regulations should be imposed to ensure safety. (In California, possession of a pure wolf is illegal unless permitted by the state Fish and Game Department. Hybrids are regulated by the state only if one of the breeding pair is a pure wolf. However, local regulations may be more restrictive, making hybrids illegal in certain cities or counties, authorities say.)

Pat Carney, past president of the 300-member National Hybrid Assn., hates to see states outlaw ownership of the animals she has been breeding in Tennessee for 31 years. But she also concedes something must be done. “People don’t understand the animals or have the money to build a pen large enough to confine them properly. And the average person doesn’t have access to the right kind of meat. I’m different. My husband works for the road department and he can get road-kill deer.

“If hybrids are chained up, you’re asking for an accident to happen--it makes them mean, changes their whole temperament. On the other hand, trying to make these animals act like dogs is a joke. They are beautiful and they are a challenge. But then, that’s what I love about them. I guess that makes me some kind of a freak too.�

*

Lost amid the whirlpool of opinions and prejudices surrounding hybrids is how the animals routinely suffer at the hands of their keepers.

An ongoing court case against a Washoe Valley, Nev., couple is especially sad and bizarre. William Schultz, 46, and his wife, Wendy, 41, were charged in March with child endangerment and severe animal cruelty after investigators found 11 starving hybrids and dozens of dead dogs, cats, chickens, ducks and rats at their $250,000 ranch-style home about 15 miles south of Reno.

The couple’s children--twin 8-year-old boys and an 11-year-old girl--apparently lived in what authorities described as “tidy sheds� behind their parents’ home. No wonder. A decomposing Dalmatian was discovered in the living room. Cats were seen eating dead cats in a bathroom, which was covered in feces 12 inches deep.

Investigators were stunned to learn that William, who has a degree in sociology, and bookkeeper Wendy co-own a molding business in Sparks, Nev. In June, court-ordered psychologists said the couple were competent to stand trial, scheduled later this year. (The children have been placed in temporary foster care, according to the Schultz’s attorney.)

“It was a terrible, terrible thing,� says John Marquez, head of Reno’s Animal Control Department, which euthanizes any hybrids brought to its shelter. “We had to put those dogs to sleep. We think there was some inbreeding going on out there. The dogs were idiots, malnourished, looked real bad.�

They were only the latest hybrids to wind up at his pound. Five years ago, Marquez says, “we were lucky to get two hybrid complaints a year. Now we get 10. In the past six months alone we’ve had six hybrids here other than the Schultz’s. One was beautiful . . . he was 90% wolf. We got him on the northern Reno city limits running loose along the freeway.�

Alarmed over reports of hybrids living out their lives chained or confined to basements or small cages, Kay Simmons, a real estate agent and hybrid breeder for more than two decades near Golden, Colo., has quit taking chances. Simmons, 60, requires that her customers sign a two-page contract before taking one of her animals home. Stipulations include a minimum yard size of 50 by 50 feet, a six-foot fence, and that the animals not be restrained on chains except in emergency situations.

She’s serious. Three times in recent years she has personally repossessed hybrids from owners who violated their contracts. In one case, she unchained a 50-pound female, hefted her over a gate with the help of a neighbor, then stowed the animal in her mini-station wagon and sped away.

“Most people are not evolved enough to deserve hybrids--weirdos are drawn to them,� says Simmons, relaxing on a lawn chair surrounded by a dozen of her 50 hybrids. “Out of a hundred people who want one, maybe one person should have one.�

Mark Johnson, owner of Visions West Gallery in the rustic Rocky Mountains village of Silver Plume, just west of Denver, counts himself among the chosen few. The 13-month-old, 110-pound female hybrid, sometimes chained to a granite boulder behind his tiny gallery, is his business partner and sidekick.

Her name is Cheyenne, and she has a 1997 Colorado press pass with her photograph on it. Each week, her owner claims, she telepathically dictates a newspaper column to Johnson, who types them up and publishes the pieces locally under the title “Cheyenne’s Howl.� Cheyenne also counsels the patients of an unnamed Denver therapist and social worker by nuzzling their faces and staring into their eyes, Johnson says, and she is even helping a woman recover from breast surgery.

That’s not all. Several times a day, Cheyenne entertains gallery customers by eating mango slices that Johnson offers from between his teeth.

“The deer and the wolf are my totem animals, the animals I receive my energy from,� he says matter-of-factly while seated at a desk surrounded by wolf paintings, souvenirs and books. “Some people carry crystals in a medicine bag. I have a tuft of Cheyenne’s fur and one of her baby teeth in mine.�

As closely bonded as they may be, that doesn’t mean Johnson won’t keep a close eye on the animal he knows may become less amiable when it reaches sexual maturity about a year from now. “There is a potential for problems,� he acknowledges. “But, hey, there are potential problems with any big dog.�

*

To see what it really means to be in love with hybrids, how intensely active and positive such passion can be, visit any of the dozen or so rescue centers that have sprouted up in recent years across the nation. Most are remote, uninsured nonprofit operations run on shoestring budgets, volunteer work and prayers.

Generally, the animals are kept in spiderweb-like networks of wire pens. More often than not, they were born in cages, severely abused and rejected. Because of their histories, size, strength and often unstable temperaments, they keep staffers on their toes.

“They’re intense beings, man. Keep you up and alert,� says Jeff Schwartz, 24, as he rolls a cigarette while waiting for the morning coffee to brew in a cluttered cabin at southern Colorado’s Mission: Wolf. “Show a weakness, even have the flu, and they will assert themselves.�

He knows from experience. An alpha male jealous of Schwartz’s friendship with its mate seized an opportunity to bite his arm. It didn’t break the skin, though it easily could have. The animal was merely “disciplining� Schwartz.

“I had the flu and wasn’t alert as I should have been,� Schwartz says. “All my fault.�

Bites are not uncommon at the Candy Kitchen Rescue Center, a 22-acre compound perched on a remote mountain between the Ramah Navajo reservation and the Zuni Pueblo in northwest New Mexico. A month ago, it was bursting at the seams with 45 wolves and wolf hybrids. By mid-July there were 58 on board, and Jacque Evans and her business partner, Barbara Berge, reluctantly were turning away a dozen more a week.

They have no choice. The animals are driving them to the poorhouse.

“What we really need right now this minute is a four-wheel-drive vehicle!� Evans shouts after returning from a grueling all-day trip in an ailing van to a veterinarian’s office 50 miles away in Gallup. “I thought I’d never get back. That blasted van broke down three times!�

They also need $30,000 for new pens, $50,000 for additional land, $3,000 for insurance and $3,000 a month for maintenance, says Evans, an artist by trade, in the dusty Navajo hogan that serves as her office and kitchen.

“The universe listens to faith and hard work,� reminds Berge, a former actress from Manhattan. “Although we struggle, everything keeps falling into place.�

The telephone rings.

“Yahoo!� yells Candy Kitchen public information officer George Stapleton from a back room minutes later. “That was movie director John Carpenter, and he wants a natural wild shot of a wolf tearing flesh off a carcass in the moonlight for a vampire film! He wants to give us $2,500 to rent a wolf!�

But wait. Doesn’t Candy Kitchen have a reputation for waging war against any and all purveyors of stereotypical images of wolves as disciples of Satan, harbingers of evil?

“You bet,� sniffs Stapleton. “Are we contributing to a bad image here? Don’t think so. We’re raising $2,500 to help other wolves that otherwise would be dead.�

Evans and Berge welcome that explanation. Besides, there are other pressing matters. State animal control officials have been balking on a promise not to euthanize unclaimed hybrids without first giving Candy Kitchen a chance to place them. An intense summer storm has suddenly roared out of the west, raising great clouds of dust, splitting the sky with lightning and scaring the hell out of Isis, a female wolf. A hybrid named Pacer died the night before and needs a memorial ceremony. Another animal is suffering from a large abscess behind its eye.

Beyond that, the rest of their menagerie--adults and pups rescued from across the nation and restored to health here--need feeding and cleaning.

“And look at this crap!� Evans says, slamming a newspaper down on a table, then circling in ink a column of classified ads offering hybrids for sale and trade. “Here’s one that says ‘Good with kids.’ Bull! And this one wants to trade hybrids for guns or motorcycles!�

Evans sighs: “Most people shouldn’t have one, but they do have a place in this world. But the bottom line is this: They’re here. What are we going to do about it?�

Ott, of the North American Wolf Assn., says she has the answer:

“We have to stop breeding these animals, spay and neuter every blessed one we’ve got, then allow them to live out their lives in as responsible a manner as possible. We need to wake up and see this issue from the perspective of the animals’ suffering instead of our selfish desires.�