A school visit

The kind touch of a human hand

On Monday afternoon, the Anglian Wolf Society was visited by a party of eight, eleven year old children from a nearby middle school. The visit was the first in what we hope will be a continuing series of educational events both at our site and in schools.

We had arranged for the children to meet the cubs in the small play pen where visitors usually meet the animals, so just before the children arrived we shut the wolves in an adjoining pen to set out some chairs in the play pen (the cubs would have 'helped' if we hadn't shut them out).

The children duly arrived and were soon seated in the play pen along with their two teachers and three wolf handlers from the Society. After a brief reminder to the children of how to behave around wolf cubs, we opened the gate and let the cubs in to greet the children. After a moment of hesitation, sizing up their audience, the cubs meandered happily over to begin greeting their visitors and soon the children were being treated to a full wolfie greeting of tail-wagging and face-licking The greeting process lasted for about ten minutes with every child receiving their fair share of attention from the cubs.

With the introductions over, the cubs were given a pig trotter each to keep them busy while the children were given a one-hour interactive talk about wolves with lots of opportunities to both ask and answer questions. They learned about how wolves establish and maintain a territory; how they hunt and how the whole pack helps to feed and raise the cubs. They learned about how wolves live together with a strict social pecking order with alpha animals to rule the pack and they learned about how man has hunted them almost to extinction. Towards the end of the session we addressed the subject of how they communicate and why they howl and this gave us the opportunity to invite the children to join our cubs in the most friendly and sociable activity of all - a group howl. Led by the handlers, everyone joined in and soon the cubs trotted over to join us and add their voices to the chorus. The howl lasted for about five minutes with the cubs alternately sitting beside us to sing or milling around licking and rubbing us affectionately.

After another round of greetings by the cubs, the last item on the agenda was for the children to see the wolves being fed and then it was time to gather outside the site hut for each child to be given a visitor pack to take home. Each received a photograph and fact sheet and a certificate thanking them for visiting us. As a special extra, each received a vial of puppy hair freshly moulted by our fast growing cubs.

The Anglian Wolf Society believes that this kind of hands-on, high-impact teaching is the best way to communicate to children the truth about animals such as wolves and to change fundamental attitudes in both the short and long term.

Socialised wolves make ideal ambassadors for their species and at just 11 weeks old, our wolves are already doing what wolves do very well indeed - making friends and winning hearts and minds in the battle for the survival of their species.