As reported on Wired.
BY PETE BROOK
Getting photos of wolves is difficult. It usually requires traveling into the farthest reaches of North America or other remote locations. But photographer Camille Seaman in Oakland only needed to cross the San Francisco Bay to find one for her latest project.
Aqutaq, a two year-old female white wolf (aka arctic wolf), lives in Marin County in the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais with owner Oliver Starr. Aqutaq is not wild, but she certainly isn’t a pet; she was purposefully bred in captivity and raised to be an “ambassador wolf” for Starr’s ongoing advocacy for the protection of wolf species.
“It is a complex thing; to have a wild thing in your home,” says Seaman. “I understand the need for wolf ambassadors, and that is what Aqutaq is being raised to be, but it just is a very different life than living in the Arctic wilderness. Is one better than the other? Who can say?”
Seaman heard about Starr and his activism through a mutual friend and soon met up to walk their dogs together. Seaman cares for a Tamaskan, a designer mutt from Finland, and an older female Husky-mix.
As public speaker and “wolf-walker,” Starr — alongside Aqutaq — encourages people to learn about and support healthy ecosystems and carnivore preservation. Starr also diligently curates information online and answers questions on Quora about wolves as pets, current hunting issues and best actions in the extremely unlikely incidence of wolf attack. He’s even got an answer to the inquiry, “Do wolves snore?”
“Aqutaq is socialized,” says Starr, “But this is not the same thing as being domesticated which is a process of breeding over time. She is still very much a wild animal, though one bonded to a mixed pack of two humans and a giant woolly Alaskan malamute. We live in the country on a large and very safely enclosed property and she is given as much freedom as we can provide.”
In addition to having a naturally-landscaped, large enclosure to roam, Aqutaq is taken out regularly and, where it is safe and legal, given the opportunity to run freely while Starr is with her. Seaman made images both in Starr’s back yard and off-leash in the Marin countryside.
“She loves us enough to come back when we need her to,” says Starr of Aqutaq, whose name means ice cream in the indigenous Alaskan Yupik language.
While Aqutaq is a white wolf, Starr advocates on behalf of all species. The gray wolf, for example, was on the brink of extinction in the 1970s and 80s due to deminishing habitat and hunting. Reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, gray populations bounced back, surpassing recovery goals year after year.
There is an ongoing debate about whether or not the wolves still require legal protection as a lifting of their endangered status led to detrimental quota hunting in Idaho and Wyoming. Despite a slight dip in population last year, more than 1,600 wolves now roam the northern Rockies.
“If we leave wolves alone they would be fine,” says Starr. “In areas where wolves have been historically, their populations ebb and flow naturally to maintain homeostasis with the species upon which they prey. Wolves are perhaps the most crucial of all non-human carnivores and they deserve specific attention for their role in maintaining healthy landscapes.”
Starr’s thirty years of advocacy has followed the troughs and peaks. While the population recovery is promising, Starr believes the objectives of the original wolf management plan have not been met to merit their removal from protection.
“One crucial criteria [to be met] was documented proof of genetic transfer from the various populations that we reintroduced across the northern Rockies. Without this transfer taking place the genetics of each separate group is limited and problems associated with limited genetic diversity are likely to occur,” says Starr.
Seaman is not neutral and is fully behind Starr’s message. They both believe that “all of them could be left to live as nature intended.”
“It is a strange thing that we as humans always feel the need to meddle,” says Seamam. ”I am pretty sure this is a result of a story people told themselves a long time ago. In that story man forgets, disregards, disrespects the relations he has to all the Earthlings. In doing this he destroys the very thing that makes his existence possible.”