Die unterschiedlichen Methoden der Handaufzucht

When we arrived, Zsófi said that first she had to see what the wolves were doing because Kaspar had been a little bit scared of strangers. They were sleeping though, so we simply entered. We sat down in the middle of the enclosure next to Taya and Aragorn, but they didn’t realize that we arrived or they were not interested in contacting us. We started to whine, but no reaction. It was an interesting difference compared to our wolves, because when they were young and strangers came to meet them, they were always happy and greeted them, licked their mouth.
Only with Taya I could “speak”, but I had to whine, hold my face close to hers to make her realize that there was somebody there. I think we have never had a wolf who was whining so much to express her emotion.
After a while Zsófi tried to call Kaspar to us in order to see his reaction, but he was scared. He took the meat from our hands but only when Zsófi was holding him. When we approached him, he ran away. To form our relationship a little bit we went for a walk in the park. First he tried to position himself in a way that Zsófi was between us, but when we met other people I was also a harbour for him. After the walk, in the enclosure he approached me, I could pet him, but he didn’t trust me so much. According to my experiences it can get better if a wolf is afraid of strangers, but always only specifically with certain persons. If she/he meets this person often, they work or play together, the reaction to this person may get better but she/he will not be kind with all people in general.
For me it seemed that the WSC wolves had stronger contact with dogs that with humans, but Shima was scared by our stranger dogs. When we took our dogs in she was growling, her tail was under her stomach, and didn’t come closer. I’ve never seen that behaviour, because our wolves in this age always licked the mouth of stranger dog and were happy to greet them.
It was a very short time to observe the differences in the behaviour of these and our wolves but there were some interesting things. One of them was the howling. In the evening we started to howl, but first nothing happened. Zsófi said that usually it took 5-8 minutes that the wolves start to howl. Our wolves in this age immediately came to us when we started howling and licked our mouths and were howling in front of us. Later Taya started to howl and then also the others joined in, but only one of them came to me, licked my face and whined. The others were somewhere in the dark with Friederike.
It would be nice to meet these Timber wolves often to see how they behave in different situations. We have European wolves.

By Zsófia Virányi:
Why are these two groups of wolves so different if both of them are hand raised? (At least partly) because the hand raising methods are crucially different at the two places! Many different hand raising methods exist!
The researchers seem to agree at least that taming wolves is impossible if the pups stay together with their mother. If the pups are not separated from the mother before eye opening from their 4th week on they start to show fear and avoidance toward people. Every later human handling (e.g. veterinary check) will cause high stress and it will be impossible to enrich their life with joint activities with humans.
Beyond this, however, very different methods have been used to rear wolf pups in human contact during the scientific history of wolf hand raising. Some tried it with the help of a dog foster mother; others excluded early contact with any adult canines. Some raised the whole litter together using either one or few people as foster parents; others invited so many visitors as possible. Some kept the wolves always at the peaceful park where the animals finally spent their whole life; others raised them in their home and took them out into the city exposing them to many different, noisy, shiny, crowded places. No surprise that the animals show very different reactions to unfamiliar people, animals, objects and places!
Surprisingly, however, the hand raising method is hardly ever reported in details in scientific publications, and the characteristics of the animals stay hidden or can be read about only among the lines. If you read different pieces of the scientific or popular literature about hand raised wolves never make the mistake of automatically assuming that the animals grew up in the same way just because they were all hand raised!

Probably John Fentress’ Lupey was one of the wolves who received the most intensive socialization in the human world. There were no other wolves around him and he had a dog-like life first in Fentress’ flat and later on a farm. Following his example, researchers and students of the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary hand raised a group of wolves in this individual and extensive manner, providing a separate foster parent to each pup and rearing them in human homes and walking them on the streets of a big city till the age of 2 to 4 months. Later on these wolves became members of the packs of Zoltán Horkai and Dóra Újváry.

The wolves, Dóri is used to, are often exposed to film teams, cameras, unfamiliar places and travelling. Accordingly the owners put a high emphasis on confronting the animals with all different stimuli during hand raising. Dóri’s wolves grew up in a way rather distant from the natural life of wolf pups but these early experiences equip them with the characteristics which help them face the challenges of their later life style.

Clearly, our aims in the Wolf Science Center are different. Our wolves will spend all of their life in the same environment of the Cumberland Game Park, having the daily variability of playing with each other in the enclosure, going for a walk in the park or participating in the training and behavioural tests in the testing rooms. They have a dozen of researchers and helpers around them who directly interact with them, while the crowds of visitor stop by the fence. In accordance with these aims our wolves grow up in a peaceful, more natural environment.

We do not know in what way the different raising methods influence the relationship the wolves build up with the people around them. The wolves raised with Dóri’s method show positive reactions in an extreme way even to unknown people. The wolves raised in the Wolf Science Center greet their raisers in a more relaxed fashion. We are hoping that with building up a calmer relationship filled less with extreme emotional reactions we can avoid later problems of aggression toward people. We will know if we succeeded in a few years. And even in case of success there will be another factor possibly influencing differences in the behaviour of captive wolf packs, as mentioned by Dóri at the end of her impressions.