Refuge responds to cry of abandoned wolves

By Andy Piper   |   July 10, 2009   |   4:00 PM

There are wolves among the aspens.

I sense them only as a flash of pale fur, a glint of yellow eyes or now and then a soft bark — no more than a cough — of fear or distress.

I’m surrounded by wolves, but I am not the one afraid. The wolves are the ones sometimes distraught by this stranger walking in their midst.

Beneath the trees, I stand on a wooden bridge crossing a gully on the southwestern slope of Colorado’s Wet Mountains. Through the leaves I catch glimpses of the blue Sangre de Cristos far to the west. I also catch glimpses of 12-foot-high hurricane fencing, the only sign of the enclosures that, stair stepping down this stream like a series of dams, each hold two wolves or wolf-dog crossbreeds.

I am at Mission: Wolf.

Kent and Tracy Weber founded this 200-acre sanctuary in 1988. Fifth acres of it are set aside as habitat for 30 to 40 wolf and wolf-dog crossbreeds. Its main purpose is simple: to provide lifelong homes for wolves and wolf-dogs that were bred in captivity in the mistaken belief they would make good pets.

“A wolf, or a wolf-dog that inherits a wolf’s instincts, will grow up to behave like a wolf,” Kent Weber said.

“How do wolves mark their territory? With urine. If their territory is your living room, how do you think they’ll mark it?

“How do wolves carry their pups? By the head. If they think your family is part of their pack, they’ll carry your kids around by the head. Nothing persuades someone that a pet wolf is a bad idea as quickly as looking out the window and seeing a wolf carrying their 4-year-old around the yard by her head.”

The result? Dead pets, abandoned pets — or pets adopted by Mission: Wolf.

The sanctuary has 32 residents. Among them are:

• Kawh, a 14-year-old grey wolf (that’s age 98 in lupine years). He’s named after the call of the raven. His black fur turns reddish-brown during the spring molt, so his nickname is “Kawh, the red raven.”
• Aurora, a wolf-dog mix of unknown age who came to Mission: Wolf after killing turkeys and sheep on farms neighboring her home in Vermont. She is missing one foreleg, lost to a gunshot during her barnyard raids. “She was sold as a wolf, because they are worth more, but when she got here, we figured out she was mostly dog.”
• Magpie (Maggie), a 7-year-old grey wolf. Her ancestry is reported to be 3/4 British Columbian grey wolf and 1/4 Arctic grey wolf. She was bred for a movie project, wasn’t used and then was taken across state lines as a wolf-dog before she came to live here at 4 months old.
• Abraham (Abe, for short), a 3-year-old wolf-dog crossbreed that was rescued from Salt Lake City animal control. He was found wandering the city’s alleys and scavenging from dumpsters.

Maggie and Abe share an enclosure in the center of Mission: Wolf. They are the pair most often used for up-close-and-personal encounters with visitors because Weber uses them to teach the physical differences between wolves and dogs.

That’s because education is Mission: Wolf’s other mission.

Originally an architectural engineer, Weber brings an engineer’s directness to his talks to visitors. Reaching out to brush Maggie’s fur as she walks past, he holds an exchange with 11-year-old Isaac Petersen, a visitor from New Zealand

“Do you know what they did in a place called Yellowstone Park? They brought wolves back after 70 years. While the wolves were gone, do you know what all the elk and deer did?”

“No,” Isaac says in a shy Kiwi twang.

“Nothing — they sat still all day eating all the grass, and then they had all kinds of baby elk. Do you think they had enough grass to feed their babies?”

“No?”

“That’s right! So you know what they did? They went over to the trees and they started eating all the aspens and the willows and the cottonwoods. In a few years there was nothing left but trees 70 feet tall and trees 2 feet tall.”

This is Weber’s newest scientific interest: mounting evidence that the re-introduction of wolf populations in the mountain West, and especially Yellowstone, is having a positive cascade effect on many different parts of the environment. He’s especially intrigued by the research of William J. (Bill) Ripple, a professor of forestry at Oregon State University.

Wolves eat elk and deer, so after the reintroduction it was expected that there would be a decrease in those prey animals. What was not so obvious were the apparent secondary effects.

As elk change their habits to avoid wolves, aspen and willow groves rebound. With more trees available for dams and lodges, beaver populations grow. Bears become better fed as they chase wolves away from fresh kills and take them for themselves.

Weber also runs Ambassador Wolf, a program that takes wolves and wolf cubs to schools and museums for encounters with the public.

In the end, though, Weber and Mission: Wolf’s ultimate purpose is to make themselves obsolete. If there are no more wolves bred in captivity for them to rescue, and if the public knows enough about wolves so that they no longer fear their existence in the wild, that will be just fine.

“That would be our goal at Mission: Wolf,” Weber said, “to put ourselves out of business.”

Wolfing it down

Merlin, a resident at Mission: Wolf, was seen consuming two chunks of meat totaling 14.6 pounds in 2 minutes. That’s the equivalent of 58 quarter-pound hamburger patties. For comparison:

• The human record for eating hamburgers is 2.81 lbs. (11-and-1/4 quarter-pound Cloud Burgers) in 10 minutes.
• The record for eating hot dogs in the Nathan’s Famous July Fourth International Eating Contest, set last week, is 14.9 pounds (68 hot dogs, including buns) in 10 minutes.

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More information on Mission: Wolf

• Driving directions
• Check the weather conditions near Mission Wolf.

Categories: Region, Video

Tagged: captivity, crossbreed, mission: wolf, purebred, refuge, sanctuary, wet mountains, wildlife, wolves