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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November/December 2007

Books

 

Good Dog. Stay.
by Anna Quindlen

Random House (1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019), 2007. 82 pages, hardcover, illustrated. $14.85.       

 

Probably every reader who has ever had and lost a beloved dog will love Good Dog. Stay. The book is an expansion of one of Anna Quindlen's most popular Newsweek columns, memorializing her Labrador retriever Beau, who grew up with her children and lived to the age of 15.

Most readers will be people who have loved dogs, and by way of intensifying reader identification with Quindlen's thoughts, the book designers have extensively illustrated the book with photographs of dogs of many different breeds. Whatever kind of dog a reader has had is likely to be represented.

Hardly anyone will learn anything new about dogs from Good Dog. Stay. The closest Quindlen comes to making an original observation is half a page about how dogs clean up at least as many messes as they make. No other animal or appliance as efficiently clears a floor of anything edible, or defines "edible" as broadly.

But Quindlen does not pursue this thought. This is a warm, fuzzy book, not a treatise on household ecology and waste management. --Merritt Clifton

The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Rain Forest
by Ian McAllister

University of California Press (2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704), 2007. 192 pages, hardcover. Illustrated, with DVD. $39.95.

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology & Conservation
Edited by L. David Mech & Luigi Boitani

University of Chicago Press (1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637), 2007. 472 pages, paperback. Illustrated, with DVD. $30.00.

 

Appearing about six months after Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Rain Forest variously supports, reverently cites, and indirectly disputes key arguments put forward by the authors of the former. Author Ian McAllister passionately believes, as a scientist, that the British Columbia coastal habitat of the two wolf subspecies he studies should not be logged because the wolves might not survive the transformation of their territory.

McAllister is infuriated by the attitudes of humans who hunt and trap wolves, especially trophy hunters and those who blame wolves for depleting "game" after disrupting the habitat for economic exploitation.

McAllister also uncovers archaeological evidence suggesting that the First Nations people of the region are basically right in remembering that wolves and humans once shared the habitat without conflict. Observing that wolves roust or kill bears who approach their dens, McAllister contrasts this to their response toward a human interloper: edgy, but inclined to withdraw and give the human every chance to retreat. Humans, McAllister sees, are simply not on the wolf hit list, let alone the menu.

But this is not because wolves are unfamiliar with humans. On the contrary, McAllister time and again finds that wolf dens are located amid the ruins of ancient First Nations settlements. Partly, this is because wolves and humans have similar needs. But there are also hints of an ancient symbiotic relationship. Wolves feed from stone fish traps built long ago by humans, and in those times, when salmon runs were abundant enough for all, the presence of wolves might have kept bears off the humans' backs.

The Last Wild Wolves compares and contrasts the behavior of a seldom-seen mainland rainforest pack with that of an island pack who feed heavily on seafood, including beached squid. First Nations observers identified them to McAllister as different kinds of wolf. Initially skeptical, McAllister eventually learned that the two packs last had a common ancestor as long as 6,000 years ago, and have diverged significantly.

The Last Wild Wolves, unlike most "coffee table" books, is a page-turner.

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation is by contrast a scientific encyclopedia of wolves, which practically begs to be matched with a companion volume covering wolves in human culture. Each chapter is a summary of scientific papers; relatively few readers will get through them all.

After preliminary discussion of "Wolf Social Ecology," "Wolf Behavior," and "Wolf Communication," an intensive section covering "The Wolf as a Carnivore," "Wolf-Prey Relations," and "Wolf Population Dynamics" addresses the persistent belief of hunters in Alaska and the northern Rocky Mountains that healthy wolf populations are causing declines in elk, moose, and caribou.

The science demonstrates that the numbers of wolves are governed by the availability of prey, as with all predators, and that killing enough wolves in a given area to cause a significant population decline tends mainly to open habitat to dispersing young from neighboring areas--who rapidly replenish the vacant habitat, reproducing at a faster rate than if the territory had been occupied by the natural carrying capacity of wolves all along.

Science also demonstrates that about a third of the wolves in any given area can be hunted without adverse effects on the population, chiefly because hunting at this level tends to replace natural mortality, rather than adding to it. At this level, whether to hunt or not hunt wolves is more a cultural issue than a conservation issue.

In a concluding essay, editors L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani call for "the abandonment of the old prejudice that wolves are denizens of the wilderness and need wilderness to survive...Wolves appear to cope well with extreme wilderness, but they also inhabit crowded agricultural lands at the outskirts of towns and villages. The concept that wolves living near human settlements have a 'degraded' life is strongly anthropocentric and the product of a stereotyped view of nature. This concept is often used to justify removing wolves from human-inhabited areas, as if to save them from a degenerate life, but it thus prevents wolves from exploiting another niche. We must forget about wolves being only beasts of the wilderness," Mech and Boitani assert, "and focus on the wolf/human interface: this is the real challenge for conservation and is where wolf conservation most benefits overall biodiversity."

In particular, Mech and Boitani believe, "We need a shift in our long-standing conservation paradigm, from measuring success in terms of wolf numbers toward new goals in which success means expanding wolf ranges."

Mech and Boitani favor culling wolves who prey upon livestock or otherwise interfere with human interests, as the inevitable price of allowing wolves to reclaim larger portions of their historic territory.

"In the end," say Mech and Boitani, "this approach probably will yield many more wolves than we could afford to keep in a few fully protected areas, no matter how large."

In the present political environment, particularly in the U.S. west, Mech and Boitani are probably right. Yet since killing wolves at low levels does not reduce populations on a year-round basis, and serves mainly to placate people who ignorantly and often erroneously blame wolves for lost livestock and depleted "game," one might respond that improving public knowledge of wolf ecology and behavior could accomplish at least as much toward reducing wolf/human conflict.

A chapter on "Wolf Evolution and Taxonomy," by Ronald M. Nowak, outlines the prevailing scientific belief that jackals branched off the Canis family tree before coyotes, and that the ancestors of almost all domestic dogs separated relatively recently from wolves in Southeast Asia. Acknowledging that some genetic evidence points to domestic dogs having differentiated from wolves as long as 135,000 years ago, Nowak would dispute the idea that Neanderthals domesticated dogs, as envisioned in the November/December 2007 ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial.

With due respect to the weight of scientific opinion, ANIMAL PEOPLE suspects that the genetic record has been read upside down and backward. Highly specialized species like wolves usually evolve from broadly distributed generalists, like dogs, who can survive almost anywhere, but find themselves in habitat that favors specialization. As successful as wolves were in occupying most of the Northern Hemisphere, dogs occupied most of the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Northern Hemisphere, and still do.

An alternate explanation for the genetic evidence would be that wolves are dogs who became specialized large carnivores in response to the ice ages, and like many highly specialized species then hit an evolutionary dead end, albeit in a broadly distributed and long enduring habitat niche. Ancestral dogs persisted in the Southern Hemisphere and as their survival strategy adapted to living with humans. When living with humans became their main way of life, they rapidly diverged not from wolves but from the proto-dog ancestors of both wolves and domestic dogs. --Merritt Clifton

Much of the standard advice about animal care, housing, and equipment is little different from the advice offered by similar volumes for generations. Yet almost every page of How To Raise Chickens and How To Raise Cattle adds concessions, qualifications, and arguments in response to the challenges presented by animal advocates.

Both How To Raise Chickens and How To Raise Cattle counsel would-be chicken and cattle raisers against confrontational or dismissive responses to critics, whether the issue is noise, pollution, or animal welfare.

How To Raise Chickens author Christine Heinrichs includes two-plus pages of advice about slaughtering and butchering, but surprisingly little of her book promotes eating chickens, and most of her comments about high-volume poultry and egg production are critical. Almost half of How To Raise Chickens consists of breed descriptions and history pertaining to chickens. Heinrichs' emphasis is on raising rare old breeds in the best possible conditions, on a backyard scale, with scarcely a word said about making a profit and much said about the personalities and intelligence of chickens, as well as about how to keep flocks happy, healthy, and secure.

On the whole, How To Raise Chickens is less about agribusiness than about keeping chickens as quasi-pets, albeit pets who may be sold or eaten. The most offensive part to animal advocates may be the half page about dealing with predators. Saying little about discouraging poultry predators by nonlethal means, Heinrichs recommends using leghold traps to protect flocks, and explains how to cook and eat raccoons and opossums.

How To Raise Cattle discusses killing cattle only in two paragraphs about euthanizing dairy cattle who cannot be sold for slaughter. Slaughtering itself is outside the scope of the book, but author Philip Hasheider includes several pages of discussion of the ethical and emotional issues involved in selling cattle to slaughter. Hasheider's language parallels that of mid-to-late-20th century manuals for animal control and humane workers. The first pretext for slaughter Hasheider offers is that "Without a plan to selectively remove excess cattle, your farm will become overstocked by increasing animal numbers."

Though the argument that the beef industry exists to control cattle overpopulation is so transparently spurious as to seem facetious, it is significant that Hasheider feels a need to rationalize slaughter to FFA members.

Traditionally, 4-H and FFA encouraged young members to bond with animals, then shattered the bond by forcing the participants to sell their animals to slaughter after exhibition. This prepared them to raise and sell animals in a detached manner later in life.

Beginning in 1992, first 4-H and then FFA have rolled back the requirement that animals raised as projects must be sold. Partly this is in recognition that the majority of graduates today will not become farmers, though many work in other aspects of the food industry. Less acknowledged but equally obvious is that cultural attitudes toward both animals and children have changed. Children are much more likely than a generation or more ago to balk at participating in an activity that they know will harm animals. Parents are much less likely to make them do it, in the mistaken belief that learning to harm animals without qualms is part of growing up.

Unlike How to Raise Chickens and How To Raise Cattle, How To Raise Horses sidesteps controversy, saying little or nothing about rodeo, fox hunting, racing, auctions, horse rescue, Premarin, and slaughter.

Some of these topics may seem a jump or two away from a typical FFA horse enthusiast's experience, but introductions to rodeo, hunting, and racing were often included in the horse how-to books of past decades, while words of wisdom about acquiring horses from auctions and rescues might have been useful and appropriate. --Merritt Clifton