TALA
- Gender: female
- Birthdate: 04.04.2012
- Origin: Minnesota, USA
- Related to: Amarok
- Meaning of her name (Native American): wolf princess
... appearance
Tala is a medium-sized female and, depending on season, slim or a tiny bit chubby. The reason for that is probably a rather slow metabolism. Tala´s distinct, brown markings in her face and on her back, became lighter and less prominent with age. Therefore, it is not that easy to distinguish her from the other wolves anymore. However, on second glance one can easily identify her elegant kind of walking, respectively floating through the enclosure.
... character
Tala´s bossy behavior from earlier days, especially towards Chitto, rarely occurs nowadays. Only when Chitto is misbehaving or, in her view, attracting too much of the trainers´ attention, she stands tall and starts to growl. Furthermore, Tala finds it very important that Chitto greets her appropriately when she returns from a walk. This includes paying homage to her.
Apart from that, Tala´s favorite activity is sniffing trousers and shoes. She does not care if it is a fresh pair of trousers from a visitor or a dirty pair of trousers from a trainer, which she had already sniffed before. However, the duration of sniffing depends on how interesting a particular pair of trousers smells.
Towards us humans, Tala is a very gentle wolf. Especially after being in heat she often is very needy for our tender loving care. A training session might therefore easily turn into extensive cuddles. However, if Tala is motivated, she shows sincere effort and tries to fulfill the assigned tasks in a perfect way. Honestly, she is not always successful in that attempt. For example, we had to re-train the “look” command several times. The goal of this command is that the animals look into our eyes. Over time, Tala simply forgot what to do. Then she just looked around in a very cute way.
In the rain, Tala´s cooperativeness comes to a sudden end. She absolutely does not like to get wet, so she prefers to sleep in the dry straw in the shelter.
... in puppy age
Tala was the puppy with the darkest markings, also called "mask", with a dark grey brown face and white spots above her eyes. She also had the strongest fur color contrasts on her body compared to all the other puppies. At first, it was only her dark complexion that distinguished her from the others.
She did not like being alone already as a puppy, but always wanted to be with her pack members. She played a lot with the younger puppies and was very gentle. Although she was a rather quiet wolf, she sometimes got really loud when playing with her siblings.
Like her brother Amarok, Tala always seemed calm and composed, often observing the action from a distance, or lying in the shade, unimpressed by any action around her. She did not show much interest in new people, but she loved her hand-raisers very much. When the puppy-raisers slept with them, Tala was the first to snuggle up and the last to get up in the morning. But before falling asleep, she liked to chew on the toes of her carers.