About us

The Society was founded in 1999 by Phil Watson in collaboration with Runar Naess, one of Scandinavia's top canine behaviourists. We began planning to construct our own site to offer homes to zoo surplus wolves during the spring and summer of 2000. We became a Company Limited by Guarantee (non-profit company) in September 2000 and began building our site over the winter of 2000/2001. We acquired our first wolf cubs in spring 2001 from a surplus litter born in a centre in southern England.

We spent most of the year 2001 raising our cubs and developing our site (with private funding) and only started facing the public in December 2001 when we began the process of building membership and making contact with overseas conservation projects which we now raise funds for.

Within the Society, the core group - which runs our site and looks after our wolves - operates on a consent and majority basis; a bit like a family. There is no rank within the Society; there are no 'job-titles', no 'managers', no committees and no politics. There is a special place in our Society for ideology - it is round, about 18 inches high and emptied twice a week. The Society has no employees, all staff are volunteers. We have a company resolution that states that we will not compromise the cause of wolf conservation by indulging in competetive, abusive or defamatory behaviour towards other wolf conservation groups (even though some indulge in it regularly against each other and occasionally against us as well). Our site is manned and the wolves watched over 24 hours a day.

Wolves are classified in Britain as 'Dangerous Wild Animals' for two very good reasons - they can be dangerous and they are not domesticated! Keeping wolves is not a task that can safely be improvised or undertaken without in-depth knowledge of canine behaviour and appreciation of the needs and preferences of the individual wolves themselves. For these reasons, all our handlers have to attend our regular canine behaviour teach-ins and training sessions.

Our methods for socialising and handling our wolves are substantially those pioneered by Wolf Park in Indiana.

It is not possible to offer wolves an ideal life in captivity - the ideal life is out in the wild doing what nature made them to do; but we can offer them a good and satisfying life. We are not ashamed to spoil our wolves and offer them every chance to indulge their instincts as far as safety permits and to the extent where they give every appearance of enjoying life. Although we feel justified in using a range of incentives to encourage our wolves to join in as many activities as they safely can, we never physically force them to do anything that they don't want to do and will not permit them to do anything which they cannot safely do. Anyone who has seen the sheer joy of living expressed in the body language of their mad, evening play sessions and their walks through the woods and corn fields would not question that they have a good life.

We produce regular newsletters which have a mix of wolf conservation, behaviour, book reviews and Society news plus, of course, updates on our own wolves. General members (non-support group) get free or reduced-rate visits to our site as well as discounts on our range of merchandise. Full members also get to attend our open days.

Our off-site team regularly visits country shows and fairs - sometimes accompanied by our wolves - to raise funds both for our own site and for passing on to other, front-line wolf conservation projects.

The Anglian Wolf Society is not an anti-hunting organisation. Unfortunately, wolves are hunted mostly in places where there is no conceivable possibility of an end to wolf-hunting in the forseeable future of the human race. Culture, politics and geography conspire to ensure that wolves will be hunted, legally or illegally, for as far into the future as it is possible to see. All that can be done is to enter into dialogue with the hunters and persuade them to revise their methods and motivation such that their activities no longer pose a threat to the existence of the species. Adopting an idealistic, anti-hunting approach will achieve nothing except to harden the attitudes of those whos activities already cause the greatest damage. The Society is wholly opposed to all poisoning, fur farming and trapping and any method of hunting which employs technological advantage in the pursuit of an animal, such as snowmobiles and aerial hunting etc.

Our Approach

A recent approach by a film-maker interested in making a documentary about us brought up the perennial question of why we do what we do; and, of course, what the wolves get out of it. The answer to this is actually quite simple and the whole thing basically comes down to our approach to the animals themselves. We like to think that the AWS is a little different from other animal centres in this respect.

To begin with, we are not concerned with vague notions of "wild" or "natural" where captive wolves are concerned. As intellectual concepts, these notions are only applicable to wild populations. Many keepers of all kinds of animals approach the job with the belief that all they need to do to be "ethical" is to make their pen look as near wild as possible and then manage their animals as though they were living wild - and with increasing public sensitivity over the whole question of wild animals in captivity, this idea has, in some places elevated itself to the level of an ideology.

One often hears claims that these kind of methods are the most "natural" or "moral" etc. but they all usually amount to one thing; keepers ignoring what the animals themselves are telling them and slavishly following some "ethical" doctrine which usually doesn't give the animals a satisfying life at all but provides public justification for keeping them in the first place. Considerations of whether an animal should or should not be in captivity should play no part in deciding how it is kept once it is actually in captivity. At that stage, the time for conscience is over and brain power is better spent on understanding the animal itself.

Wolves are one of the few wild species which can thrive in captivity and when properly cared for and handled can apply their natural skills and intelligence to exploring and enjoying the human world. Our approach to keeping wolves is to provide them with the opportunity to satisfy their own instinctive needs by interacting with us and with the rest of the world within a set of rules which their own nature predisposes them to accept and be happy with. In so doing, the wolves themselves act as ambassadors for their species and assist our agenda which is to alter public attitudes to their species and to raise funds to assist in conserving it.

When it comes to "ethical" we like to think that it means the animals and their keepers getting the most out of life together.

Nevertheless, we do occasionally come across criticism. On one occasion, during a telephone call, when we explained briefly to a zoo official what we do, the official commented "..but isn't that just turning them into dogs?". This kind of comment requires an entire thesis by way of reply, but the essence of the argument is that since dogs are wolves there are obviously going to be a lot of similarities in handling methods and in what we can do with them. But that's where it stops. We do not turn wolves into dogs - that is behaviourally impossible - and we do not expect them to produce any more dog-like behaviour than their natural disposition permits.

Another criticism we have heard is that what we do is "irresponsible". This one is a bit easier to deal with. Firstly, it only ever comes from people who a) don't understand wolf behaviour - and even most zoo wolf-keepers don't understand much - and b) have never visited us despite having been invited more than once. Secondly, Wolf Park has been doing what we are doing for 30 years and so has another group in Britain. Where are all the corpses, insurance claims and lawsuits ? Perhaps it's true after all; wolves are not arbitrarily bloodthirsty or unpredictable in an aggressive sense. Perhaps it is not irresponsible to allow humans to socialise with wolves if both they and the wolves go away feeling happier for it !?

It is also sometimes said that wolves shouldn't be in captivity if we're not going to allow them to hunt or breed. This is simply applying a teleological view of the species canis lupus to individual animals and it doesn't hold water. (Humans are ideally adapted to work in offices for the majority of their waking hours and doing so benefits our species - but do you enjoy doing so ?)

Firstly, although wolves do spend a lot of their waking hours finding food in the wild, they don't show any sign of missing this activity when kept the way ours are. Our wolves are out and about with us regularly; exploring, scent tracking - and even occasionally catching voles, rabbits and pheasants for themselves. As we have never seen any stereotypical behaviours which would suggest that they are missing the job of hunting "wild-style" we have to assume that they are indeed not missing it.

Secondly, in the wild, not all wolves do get to breed. It's mostly only the alpha animals that breed and all the animals are well adapted to coping with not being able to breed. If we are going to talk about "natural" then it is entirely "natural" for a wolf not to have the chance to breed.