Wildness, Clinging Like a Shadow

A few weeks ago I visited a wolf sanctuary in Missouri. I’m thankful for this particular wolf sanctuary - it’s done amazing work for many years breeding species of wolves from around the world and repopulating wild communities with the pups raised there. This blog post is in no way meant to be a slight against the good work happening there. Much love and thanks to those that work with the wolves at that facility. This is merely about my observations on the effects of captivity of any kind on wild creatures.

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The signs made the announcements, but I didn’t need them to know what I was seeing.

Mexican Grey Wolf. Red Wolf. Maned Wolf. If the glass is half empty, the wolves at The Endangered Wolf Sanctuary land somewhere between survivors and relics of barely completed conquest. If the glass is half full, these are future generations of some of the most intelligent creatures on the planet, ready to be reintegrated. I share the sanctuary’s optimism and their hope, but wild things caged are never easy to see.

It was a sunny day and the gravel crunched under our feet as the tour led us through a number of different enclosures. The wolves there look healthy, they are mostly together in pairs or packs, the fenced areas are relatively large, and they can roam through them freely. Even so, at each stop we watched the wolves pacing, pacing. Wearing trails into the land running along the fences, laying down to rest in the sun only to get up restlessly moments later to sniff the air, to stare intently into the area outside the chain link fences that held the boundary firm between their pens and the outside world.

We stood for some time on a raised platform and watched a pack of Red Wolves, nearly extinct in the wild, as they played, and romped and paced. The group was a set of parents and their teenage offspring, their future uncertain as the sanctuary hopefully and patiently awaits the acquisition of land needed to set some of the group free.

I watched their lanky movements, the relaxed ways their bodies covered ground, large paws moving silently over the earth. One of them laid down in the leaves near a tree to rest. To our naked eyes he all but disappeared, his coloring so perfectly matched to the Ozark forests his species was once native to.

Watching them, I could see so clearly that they were created for a life so much wilder than the one they were currently living. Their bodies were like coiled springs, ready to pounce, jump and run, and move. Their eyes were watching, watching. Waiting for movement. Waiting for opportunity. Waiting for the hunt.

I wondered if they felt the unrest the same way I felt it in them. Born in captivity, did they remember on some level the life they were born to live? Or did it just cling to them like a shadow, a cellular memory, an instinct built into synapses and brain pathways, wired to be wild but never having had the opportunity to live that life?

In the book Beyond Words, Carl Safina talks about the Orca whales that have been subjected to confinement for the sake of research or entertainment. Again and again he describes their behaviors in captivity. Highly intelligent, social, gentle and empathic beings, Orcas exhibit similar behaviors to captive wolves. They swim circles around and around in their tanks, become listless and bored, exhibit signs of depression, and can even become violent and aggressive towards one another or other species.

Elephants, dolphins, dogs, cats, monkeys, chimps, on and on and on we can list animals who experience severe emotional distress and trauma when forced into captivity.

I’ve worked for years with kindergarten age children, and am a mother to several young children as well. I love to watch how kids play, especially outside, and especially when they think no one is watching.

They run free. They jump and climb. They laugh. They fall on the ground. They chase leaves like puppies do. They wrestle. Adults are the same. Given the chance to play and enjoy the outdoors humans are a species that moves. We hunt, we dance. We hug, and cry, and smile. We make fires and food. Given the chance we roam over vast distances. We learn. We make tools. We grieve and we have babies and we love to be wild. There are still some people on the earth lucky enough to live wild. All of us are born that way. In our last moments here on earth, it’s the state we return to as well.

So many of us live muted lives. Civilization does this to us. It isolates and separates from the living world around us, and from each other. It turns us into machine parts, and measures our success in life in terms of production. But so many of us want more. So many of us feel powerful undercurrents pulling on us. Our instincts, our senses, our minds, our hearts, our bodies crave more than the current culture feeds us.

We are the wolves behind fences. We are the whales swimming circles in tanks that should be open oceans. We recognize that captivity is unhealthy for other species, even though we keep capturing them. We understand that taking wild creatures and keeping them contained is a kind of poison. And yet we seem unable to recognize the same symptoms of captivity in ourselves.

So many of us are depressed, anxious, sad, frightened, traumatized, even suicidal. Addicted. Lonely. Wanting. Hungry for life pregnant with meaning. Longing for connection.

We can open our eyes. We can see this for what it is; a social experiment gone awry. We can look at each other and admit we don’t feel well. That we suspect there should be more to life than the meager helping we are given. We can look around and see the paths we’ve worn into the ground like captive wolves. We’ve lived inside the fence so long many of us don’t notice it anymore. But we can still see through the chain link. We can smell and see the wild on the other side. And we can feel it pulsing within ourselves, and within one another.

We are kept in cages we ourselves have designed. We hold the keys in our hands. Let us feel them pressing into our palms. Let us smell the metallic scent of them and remember. Let us try them in every lock we find. There is life beyond these walls.

It’s time to rejoin it.