SOURCE: Psychology Today - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dogs-best-friend/201803/the-enduring-friendship-wolves-and-humans
Pierotti and Fogg build the case for a natural, abiding affinity between humans and wolves, including the ones who took up residence among them. They attribute the first friendships to young female wolves and humans and to children. Because it is common in wolf packs that only the alpha or top-ranking female breeds in a given year, ”sometime in the last 100,000 years,” they postulate, a young, pregnant female, driven from her pack by her mother, the alpha female, took up residence in a cave overlooking a valley that since her last visit, a pack of bipeds had occupied. She excavated her den and watched the furless bipeds out of curiosity as much as any other motivation. A young woman watched the wolf and one day took her a chunk of the hunters’ kill. Initially, the wolf was wary, but hunger soon won out and from that act of friendship grew a cooperative partnership spanning thousands of generations of wolves and humans. They were simpatico, were friends from first meeting or nearly so. They were similar in ways great and small, from family structure to the habit of sharing the labor and rewards of hunting and raising the young of the pack, for when she taught her pups to hunt, she also educated the human hunters who were already imitating wolf ways of hunting.
They had, for example, already learned how to locate a pack on the hunt by watching ravens who followed wolves. Humans could help wolves in the difficult endgame, because with their bows and spear throwers they could kill more successfully and with less chance of injury than could wolves, who excelled at running down and baying up prey until the humans arrived. They learned that if they rewarded the wolves sufficiently—that is, if they shared the spoils with this other species—their alliance might continue, with the boldest, most social among the wolves born of the exiled mother who hung around and even established packs nearby. Pierotti and Fogg observe that this scenario could have been repeated in many different valleys as the newly arrived humans followed prey.
Cooperative hunting involving individuals of different species is rare but not uncommon, according to Pierotti and Fogg, nor does it require any of the participants to subordinate themselves to the other. Rather, it often seems to involve flushing prey from hiding and driving it into a trap—or the jaws of the other—and the use of a separate language or set of signals. Pierotti and Fogg use examples of interspecies hunting to place the collaboration of wolves and humans in context.
A major contribution of Pierotti and Fogg lies in their examination of the ways indigenous people around the world have related to dogs and wolves. Although contrary to their claim, they are not the first to make use of that material, they provide an expansive survey that ranges from Europe through Siberia and Central Asia to Japan and North America with a side trip to Australia for a close look at how Aboriginal people incorporated dingoes into their lives and Dream Time. They discuss cultures that did not distinguish between wolves and dogs. “The consistent pattern within all of these Indigenous stories,” they write, “is that the relationship between wolf and human was based upon respect and cooperation, especially in hunting, implying a complex and interesting alliance with the organisms that we refer to today as dogs.”
Pierotti and Fogg devote considerable space to a review of the current state of wolves and wolf-dog hybrids, focusing on how many people, even among experts are hard-pressed to distinguish between wolves, wolf hybrids, and dog breeds that look like wolves. They refute claims that wolves are more aggressive than dogs toward people. Examining the argument that centuries of persecution have made wild wolves distrustful of humans, Pierotti and Fogg show that even if that is true some wolves continue to take pity on the naked biped and bless those who would receive it with their friendship. That doesn’t mean everyone should go seek a sociable wolf or wolf hybrid, but it does suggest we recognize that they are all around us.
