Slideshow: Visit of Wolfgang Schleidt and Dorothy Gracey on 29.05.2008

To depict a rough approximation of a month-old wolf pup's world, WS made a sketch in the style he used during his lectures to show a young creature's environment in a few lines on the blackboard. The drawing emphasizes that a wolf pup at this young age is not merely responding to stimuli but is busy exploring her or his world of fellow individuals, objects, odors, and sounds.

The basic inventory of his or her world starts with two types of objects, entities: individuals ("living beings") and things ("inanimate objects").
The first individual encountered by a wolf pup is his or her mother. This category expands quickly to siblings, individual sibs, and other fellow creatures, such as humans.
The first things, starting with chewables encountered in the den, soon expand to edibles (food) and non-edibles (toys).
All other discernable entities that stand out on their background, not yet explored through being sniffed, chewed, and/or seen, animate and inanimate alike, remain in the anonymity of "clutter" until they are incorporated into the individual´s data base.

As for the basic geometry of the pup's world, it is a Euclidian space (indicated by the x,y,z-axes behind the central pup), with a basic supporting surface (the "ground") and free space above ("sky").

This space has certain basic physical features relevant to supporting life (the "state", such as current temperature, noise level, daylight, etc.) which also allow the pup to see, smell, touch other individuals or things, and hear the howls of other wolves and join in.

But beware: this image of the pups world is just one "slice" of time. To represent behavior, we need to view the world in 4D, adding time as a most relevant additional axis. Behavior and knowledge in time: New behavior patterns emerge by maturation (e.g., in male leg lifting while urinating) or by learning new skills. World knowledge, over time, is expanding through detecting interesting, recognizable things amidst the clutter and by adding new features to encountered entities.