Eyes peeled

...in the course of [my] wanderings [in the Sacred Headwaters of the Skeena, the Stikine and the Nass], I came upon...a remarkable man: Alex Jack, an Gitxsan elder and chief who had lived as a trapper and a hunter in that country for all of his life. And over the course of 30 years, I recorded traditional tales from Alex, mostly mythological accounts of Wy-ghet, the trickster transformer of Gitxsan lore who, in his folly, taught the people how to live on the land. And just before Alex died at the age of 96, he gave me a gift. It was a tool carved from caribou bone by his grandfather in 1910, and it turned out to be a specialized implement used by a trapper to skin out the eyelids of wolves. It was only when Alex passed away that I realized that the eyelids, in some sense, were my own, and having done so much to allow me to learn to see, Alex in his own way was saying goodbye...

-- from A wilderness worth saving by Wade Davis

Wolf children

In Train Dreams, Denis Johnson tells of a child that has been raised by wolves and has become wolf-like.  The description is especially vivid, as if the reality were seen by flashes of lightning.

Is it credible, though, that a child can adapt and change to such a degree?  Most supposedly documented cases of wild children turn out to be bogus or distorted.  Even so, intelligent people continue to find them plausible.  Shinichi Suzuki included the following in his book Nurtured By Love (English translation 1983):

In 1941, two professors from Denver and Yale universities received an account of a valuable piece of research. A priest in India had found two small children who had been raised by a wolf. One was about two years old and the other about seven...The discovery was made northwest of Calcutta in a jungle zone...
     Head, breast and shoulders of both children were covered with thick hair, After it was cut, they looked like human beings.
     In the wolf's cave, the infants crawled on all fours, their eyes seeing clearly in the dark. Their noses were extremely sensitive. They ran fast on all fours, like a dog, and people could not overtake them. Their shoulders were wide, their legs powerful, with bent thighs that would not stretch out straight. They grasped things with their mouths, not with their hands...

'New dances with wolves'

In a talk advocating the reintroduction of wolves to Scotland, Jim Crumley quotes Doug Smith, the head of the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction project since it began in 1995:

Clearly this is an animal less likely to offer scientists irrefutable facts than to lure us on a long and crooked journey of learning.

Between ourselves

Yes, the differences between Man and other animals are less than philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Nagel supposed, says Mark Vernon [1]; but that does not mean we should suppose there are no differences.

Rather, Vernon argues, it is a question of how we should recalibrate our understanding of the gap between ourselves and them; and moral and rational intelligence -- properties unique to humans -- are inextricable from linguistic ability:

a deeper understanding of what it is to be human can emerge from "somewhere between" the wolf and the philosopher.

Nick Lane sees it like this:

Language without feeling is bereft of meaning, but feelings exist, meaning exists, without any verbal language, as a core consciousness of mute emotions and wordless perceptions.

Some evidence indicates that forms of morality do too. As Deborah Blum writes in her review of Wild Justice:

[Mark Berkoff and Jessica Pierce] see moral actions as dictated by the behavioural code of social species, the communal operating instructions that bond a group safely together, the "social glue" of survival. They believe such codes are necessarily species-specific and warn against, for instance, judging wolf morals by the standards of monkeys, dolphins or humans.

Still, a "moral" decision can seem remarkably similar across many species.

Alasdair Macintyre argues that:

the virtues we need, if we are to develop from our initial animal condition into that of independent rational agents, and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves and in others, belong to one and the same set of virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals, whose dependence, rationality and animality have to be understood in relationship to each other.

Footnote

[1] An article in a series titled Should we care about animals?

Dog days

Alexander Fiske-Harrison wishes The Philosopher and the Wolf had included a section on what it is like to be a wolf. Perhaps Temple Grandin is helpful. Consider, for example, this from an essay on consciousness in animals and people with autism:

Chimpanzees have self awareness. When they look at themselves in a mirror, they do not react to the image as if it was another animal, and if paint is applied to the chimps face, it will try to wipe it off. Because dogs are not able to do this, one should not jump to the conclusion that dogs are not self aware. Dogs may not be visually self aware, but are possibly smell self aware. A dog marking its territory is able to discriminate between its own urine and a strange dog's urine.

I am not a 'dog person' but I think I can understand what it is like to be one from observation, and from Pablo Neruda's A Dog Died (linked on right hand side of this page)

Wild 2.0

Dr Claudio Sillero...says vaccinations are the only hope of maintaining the Ethiopian wolf population.

-- from Race to save world's rarest wolf. (Ewolf blog here)