“Brahf! Ahwuft!” I exhale breathily, from the back of my throat. Simultaneously slapping the dirt with both hands, I lower my head and raise my rear end in a play-bow. The two juvenile wolfdog siblings regard me bewilderingly—a new interloper in their domain—with a mixture of fascination, nervousness, and excitement. It is late June in the remote, high desert of New Mexico. The setting sun paints a gorgeous pastel of pinks, oranges, and reds on the horizon. The afternoon’s blistering heat gives way to the refreshing coolness of dusk. The day exhales, and so do I.
***
Having just left the staff shower house, I was garbed in nothing but a pair of cloth shorts and tattered cowboy boots. Yet there I was alongside a fellow caretaker, in the dirt on all-fours, romping, twisting, yipping, and howling with two of our multispecies community’s newest arrivals, Jethro and Nio, who had only just begun to settle into their home at Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary.
Nio’s interest was piqued by my antics. She reciprocated—throwing her head with abandon, play-bowing, and dashing around me in circles as I feinted and feigned to give chase. Jethro, on the other hand, oscillated between playfulness and the instinctive neophobia of wild-type canids.[1] One second he chuffed at me trepidatiously, and the very next he relented, offering his own play-bow and joining Nio and I in our frenetic dance. The singularity of this carefree, interspecies choreography managed to stem the tide of despair that had overcome me earlier that day. For a year and a half, my life had been characterized by loss, death, grief, displacement, and trauma. Yet, in that beautifully fleeting moment of embodied human-canid connection, there was only joy, curiosity, and openness to possibility. The rest was held in abeyance. This was a sanctuary made manifest for not just Jethro and Nio, but me as well.
[Image Description: Three high-content juvenile wolfdog siblings with gray, brown and tan fur stand on a dirt foreground with chainlink fencing in the background.]
My own journey to multispecies sanctuaries began a decade ago, in the wake of the sudden death of my dog, a growing rift between my father and I, and ending an abusive relationship. I decided (in a rather embarrassingly Chris McCandless-esque fashion) to quit my job, give up most of my worldly possessions, and leave my hometown to volunteer at a wolf sanctuary in rural Colorado, Mission: Wolf.
What was supposed to be a few months-long reprieve from “civilization” turned into over two years of caring for our canid residents, and educating the public about wolf ecology, conservation, and the intricacy of sanctuary and rescue. When I decided to pursue graduate school, my time at Mission: Wolf inspired me to reshape my applications around a proposed multispecies ethnography of wolf/dog sanctuaries. One social dynamic, among many, that I wanted to investigate was the disproportionate prevalence of gay, queer, trans, and nonbinary people who came to live and work in these sanctuaries. At the time, I was entirely unaware that this intellectual curiosity stemmed from the queerness within myself that I had stifled out of shame and self-loathing. My pursuit of a PhD in anthropology became a way to safely explore these latent parts of my identity, mediated by a detached analytical distance. But why, exactly, do the gays and queers love wolves, wolfdogs, and all manner of ill-defined canid crosses or “hybrids” that occupy the interstices of human taxonomic systems? Following Jethro and Nio’s journey sheds some light on this phenomenon.[2]
A mere five months before my introduction to them, Jethro and Nio had been living in deplorable, horrifying conditions at a fur and urine farm in Ohio. There were nearly 500 animals at the farm, including coyotes, foxes, skunks and raccoons, among other species. Wild Spirit is, at the time of this writing, home to over one hundred captive-born, wild-type canids. While many are rescued from overtly abusive and violent industries like fur farms, most were originally bred and sold as pets to private homes. This phenomenon is tied to anthropomorphic desires to be close to wildness and the exotic. However, prospective “owners” of these canids are often ill-equipped to care for them, particularly when they exhibit unruly, fractious, and indeed “wolfy” behaviors. For wolfdogs, this assertion of agency often comes at their own peril, as many are euthanized precisely because of their intractability and genetic makeup, which is read as dangerous by dog shelters and humane societies, and as a threat to the genetic “purity” of wild wolves by state conservation agencies.[3]
The divergent paths by which these displaced more-than-humans find their way to sanctuary reflects the deeply layered and sprawling psychic economy of the wolf in the West. In colonial North America, wolves have often epitomized the bestial and the savage. As Caroline Abbott wrote, “wolves were a national enemy. Those who killed canids were eliminating both physical and ideological threats to colonization.” Wolf extirpation continued with the founding and settler-colonial expansion of the U.S.[4] This centuries-long anthropocentric and anti-Indigenous violence eventually gave rise to remorse and nostalgia within a nascent environmentalist movement in the late twentieth century, ultimately leading to gray wolves being granted Endangered Species protections in the 1970s. The figure of the wolf has since undergone a remarkable discursive transformation into a symbol of romantic, unbridled wildness that is to be celebrated and preserved.[5] Amidst this ideological confluence, Americans also began to breed and sell wolfdog crosses as pets (often using Huskies, Malamutes, and Shepherds to retain wolf aesthetics), with the popularity of this practice rising dramatically in the past twenty years.[6]
The fur farm that Jethro and Nio survived capitalized on both the intense love and virulent hatred of wolves—lupophilia and lupophobia—to extract as much animal capital as possible. Their skins and bodily fluids harvested for clothing, hunting and trapping, perfumes and colognes; some were sold as boutique pets. Though it is illegal to keep “pure” gray wolves as pets, the U.S. federal government classifies any canine with dog DNA to be a dog—a loophole that allows animals who are phenotypically, morphologically, and behaviorally wolves to be bred, sold, and managed like domestic dogs, unless restricted by state or local laws.[7] Paradoxically both desired and reviled, these lupine beings exist in the liminal spaces between, or outside of, domesticity and wildness—a fugitive ontology that all too often leads to premature death.
[Image Description: Two white wolfdogs stare at the camera through the bars of a small, rusted wire cage.]
As the human residents and stewards of a multispecies sanctuary, most of us come to identify with the biographies of particular canids. Through the quotidian acts of feeding, medicating, building secure enclosures, socializing, and playing with our more-than-human kin, we have the incredible privilege to watch their growth, healing, and transformations when they are afforded relative peace and autonomy—as imperfect as it may be.[8] Importantly, themes of abuse, violence, and neglect do not define these intersubjective bonds; many of the rescues come from loving homes that simply could not provide the proper quality of care. Beyond the interspecies bonding that may occur through resonant experiences of displacement, trauma and harm, there is both a tacit and explicit acknowledgement that many of us humans, too, exist in the precarity of the liminal—whether that be due to our genders, sexuality, race, disability, class, or a combination thereof. For me and many of my fellow caretakers, our queerness resonates deeply with the taxonomic queerness of wolf/dogs and other hybridized canids; by virtue of our mere existence, we upend the stagnant classifications of life that still adhere to dichotomies of domestic-wild, masculine-feminine, straight and gay, cis and trans.
[Image Description: A person with a backwards hat and a beard wearing glasses in a dusty blue jacket and a person with a yellow and blue flannel and sunhat carry five-gallon buckets of raw meat to an enclosure with two wolfdogs, a white one stands in the foreground behind the fence awaiting food while a brown/gray one stands uphill looking downward.]
As a friend and fellow caretaker described their decision to come to a wolf/dog sanctuary, they “went into it knowing that this was going to inhabit perhaps a liminal space in my life. This is a big transition period. And this is the setting for that transition period.” For them, such a transition occurred at multiple scales—personal, social, and physical. For myself, my transformations have been subtle and protracted. It was through the sanctity of queer multispecies community that I began to allow the dormant parts of myself to emerge. Over the years, I began to let go of my anxious attachment to masculinity—a bastion I had always retreated to when I felt insecure. Counterintuitively, this was facilitated in part by engaging in some of the most ostensibly “masculine” forms of labor imaginable: butchering roadkill and dead livestock to feed to wolves, constructing massive fences and buildings, wielding chainsaws to gather firewood for winter. Crucially, I labored in these ways alongside friends, lovers, and comrades who were visibly, affectively, and socially queer. And for us, it was this intrepid queerness that was at the beating heart of the sanctuaries; it was us who helped push the organizations to adhere to their professed values and lofty ideals of a holistic sanctuary for humans and nonhumans alike. A queer ethic of care suffused our multispecies relations.
[Image Description: In the foreground, a wolf with gray and silver fur and amber eyes looks to the left, while a smiling young person with long brown hair, wearing a blue flannel, pets the wolf along their back. Green foliage and chainlink fencing are in the background.]
My process of transformation crossed the Rubicon in 2023 during my fieldwork, when I was mauled by a wolf whom I cared for. It was one of the most horrifying and surreal experiences of my life. Caretakers being intentionally attacked by canids in a wolf/dog sanctuary, or other large-carnivore facility, is rare, but it is an inherent risk we accept. The wolf in question, while not abused at her previous home, had been socialized in a way that prioritized human desires while depriving her of crucial conspecific companionship and teachings, resulting in a number of maladaptive and reactive behaviors.[9] I do not blame her. I still care for her. I still love her.
After the attack, I remember looking down at my eviscerated right forearm, into a gash that exposed my wrist muscles. As I stared in shock into my body’s interiority, I saw tendons lurch back and forth as I flexed my hand to assess the damage. This attack inaugurated the prolonged personal hardship I alluded to earlier: the loss of a long-term partnership and my house, the death of my estranged father, and the diagnosis of a lifelong mental disability. This completely inverted my relationship to “home” versus “field.” I no longer just yearned for sanctuary; I needed it.
In retrospect, this wound was not just a corporeal opening, but also an ontological laceration—a rupture at the foundation of the self. Like alchemy, this wound catalyzed the painful purging of corrosive humors, a process that felt like oblivion. Yet this clearing made space for transmutation, and the inchoate parts of myself to surface, to coalesce, to be recognized. Now, when I look upon these scars, TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me,”—a driving, pumping rock song about werewolves embracing their own monstrosity and ostracization—plays on repeat in my head:
“My mind has changed
My body’s frame, but, God, I like it
My heart’s aflame
My body’s strained, but, God, I like it
…
Got a curse we cannot lift
Shines when the sunset shifts
There’s a curse comes with a kiss
The bite that binds the gift that gives”
Delivered in tangible form via the fangs of a wolf, this gift and curse is, for me, an interspecies solidarity borne from a shared subjection to colonial nature-culture binaries and attendant taxonomies of species and sexology. To be clear, I do not wish to minimize or romanticize interspecies violence. And I recognize that not everyone wishes, or has the privilege, to embrace or claim (queer and/or nonhuman) monstrosity.[10] I only wish to describe my processing of this harrowing experience, how a novel recognition of the sensuous precarity of multispecies sanctuary emerged from it, and how it can press radical others into relation.
It is this solidarity that opens ways of relating to and understanding canid kin. For wolfdogs Jethro and Nio, their behaviors, desires, and designs in the world exceed and fracture both the literal and taxonomic cages imposed on them. In some moments, they are wolves to each other and to us; while in others, they may be more akin to dogs, and in others still, they are something else entirely—in-between wildness and domesticity, but also beyond it. Their rejection of ontological enclosure or fixedness resonates with Trans studies scholar Kadji Amin’s assertion that gender variance is not exhausted by the menus and axes of contemporary sexological taxonomy. Rather, gender may also be contextual; “constituted relationally and through shifting social worlds.”[11] The social vibrancy, transgressiveness, and creativity of my canid kin shifts according to context, space, time, and the interlocutors at play. Being in community with the more-than-human in this way instills within me the courage to embrace my own social and relational fluidity, adaptations, and shapeshifting.[12] Through this embrace, I am empowered to draw from or re/appropriate established (queer) taxonomies, without ever being defined or limited by their categories.
Darkness slowly enveloped us while we sat in the dirt, laughing and marveling at Jethro and Nio learning to explore and embrace their newfound lives in real-time. Before leaving, I laid down on my back, making myself as non-threatening as possible for the flighty wolfdogs. As I had hoped, this put them at ease, and they sheepishly crept toward my outstretched boots. They each gave me a thorough sniff before bounding away again, leaving me with the precious gift of being one of the very few humans they had ever made physical contact with. Despite the horrors they were subjected to, and the ways their bodies and lives were objectified, Jethro and Nio’s fervor for life was not extinguished. They remain open to possibility, change, and transformation. And, if there is anything to be salvaged from the fraught concept of “wildness,” it is in the wily tenacity and audacious hopefulness of these queer taxonomic renegades.[13]
[1] Neophobia refers to a fear of novel stimuli and objects, generally considered to be a survival adaptation in wild-type canids and other wild animals. See Lucia Moretti et al, “The influence of relationships on neophobia and exploration in wolves and dogs,” Animal Behaviour 107, (2015): 159-173. See also Paul Mitchell Koch, “The Influence of Genetics on Neophobia: Responses of Wolves, Wolfdogs and Dogs to Visual Stimuli,” (B.S. diss, University of Northern British Columbia 2017).
[2] For an exceptional analysis of the affinities between queerness, animality, and the more-than-human world, see Cleo WölfleHazard, Underflows; Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2022). See also Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, “Tranimalities in the Age of Trans* Life,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 195-208.
[3] For further context on the advent of the wolfdog phenomenon, here are respective mini-documentaries on Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary and Mission: Wolf.
[4] Michael J. Robinson, Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West. (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2005).
[5] For a succinct overview of the lore and symbolic and cultural capital of the figure of the wolf, see Garry Marvin, Wolf (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2011).
[6] When searching for credible sources that estimate the number of wolfdogs living as pets in the U.S., a statistic between 250,000-500,000 often comes up (see Robert H. Busch’s The Wolf Almanac (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2018)). However, most of my interlocutors within the wolfdog world consider this to be a vast overestimate, with the actual number being in the tens-of-thousands at most. Even so, most concur that their popularity is rapidly rising. Wild Spirit, for example, annually receives between three to five hundred requests to place wolfdogs and other wild-type canids.
[7] The Animal Welfare Act defines a dog as “any live or dead dog (Canis familiaris) or any dog-hybrid cross,” and a “hybrid cross” as “an animal resulting from the crossbreeding between two different species or types of animals….Crosses between wild animal species and domestic animals, such as dogs and wolves or buffalo and domestic cattle, are considered to be domestic animals.”
[8] For more insight into the stories of the rescues, see Wild Spirit’s magazine, The Howling Reporter, or Mission: Wolf’s newsletter, Wolf Visions.
[9] Kathryn Lord, “Domestication and the critical socialization period,” The Karlsson Lab, August 7, 2017.
[10] Kadji Amin, “Trans* Plasticity and the Ontology of Race and Species,” Social Text 143, no. 2 (2020): 49-71.
[11] Kadji Amin, “Taxonomically Queer? Sexology and New Queer, Trans, and Asexual Identities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 29, no. 1 (2023): 91-107, 103-104.
[12] Here I am referring to the shapeshifter as a trope or figuration that has always induced anxieties in the Western imaginary because of how it destabilizes fixed categories and contrived binaries, especially along the lines of species, gender, and sexuality. See John B. Kachuba. Shapeshifters: A History (London, UK: Reaktion Books 2019).
[13] Jack Halberstam’s recent work attempts to reappropriate wildness as a concept for queer liberatory potential. Though it is a project I admire and find value in, it is not one I see as viable. See Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). See also Jodi Byrd, “Beast of America: Sovereignty and the Wildness of Objects,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 599-615.
* Cover Image by Paul Koch, used with permission.
[Cover Image description: A young wolfdog with brown and gray fur stands in the center of the frame, staring directly at the camera on a field of snow.]
Edited by Katie Kung; reviewed by Katherine Cheung.