… because I’m hearing them again tonight.
I think that what really gets to me about the sound of wolves howling in the Alaskan night is that it’s such an … alien sound. The sounds that dogs make are usually comprehensible to us human beings, because we’ve bred and raised dogs to communicate with us as well as with each other. When a dog barks or howls or cries, you can usually tell, in a general kind of way, what it’s trying to say - if it’s hurt or scared or angry or happy.
Howling wolves do not sound like that. It’s a rising and falling warble that just doesn’t convey anything in human. When I first heard it on Friday and thought that it was a dog, I thought maybe it was hurt or trapped. But that’s not quite the right sound, either. It’s clearly speaking to other wolves, and while I imagine that we could learn to decode the high-level aspects of its language if we studied them, it’s not something that we start out with the slightest ability to understand.
Living around wild animals has sometimes made me stop and think about the fact that humans from even the most wildly varying cultures can understand each other on a fundamental level. We might be misled by (stupid) beliefs about cultural superiority or whatnot, but we can always tell if other humans are sad or angry or happy. Even if the cultural trappings are different, we can enjoy each other’s music and understand each other’s sense of humor.
But meeting a wild animal in its wild environment gives you a very strong impression of meeting an adult from a different species. That’s always how I feel when I’m out and about in the woods and happen to come face to face with a fox or moose or whatever. They’re not trapped in an artificial childhood, as domestic animals are. They have grown up, and they clearly have their own lives and their own way of comprehending their world, just as we do. It’s hard to describe, but it’s a very different feeling from interacting with a domestic cat or dog or horse.
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