Amulet and Fenris
People keep wolves as pets for all different reasons. Two of the most common are (1) to make a connection to nature through keeping a part of the wild with you, and (2) as macho symbols of power and aggression. Fenris and his sister, Amulet, are the unfortunate results of the latter type of thinking.
Their mother lived with 17 other wolves in a private compound in Michigan. Shortly before Fenris and Amulet were born, the compound was raided by the police looking for illegal drugs and guns. The wolves’ owner shot one of the officers while trying to protect himself and his wolves. In the ensuing confrontation, the owner was shot and killed. When the dust finally settled, all 18 wolves were transferred to the Michigan Humane Society’s dog shelter.
Never having handled wolves before, the shelter staff was overwhelmed and didn’t notice that Fenris’ mother was pregnant. She dug a shallow den in the back of her 10 ft. square enclosure and gave birth to four black pups while the staff looked on helplessly in April of 2007. The pups were left in the enclosure with their mother for four months, only being handled once to spay and neuter them.
Fenris and his siblings learned, even before birth, that the world is a terrifying place. The stress and trauma their mother encountered by watching her owner be killed and being moved into an unfamiliar environment was transferred to the puppies through extremely high levels of adrenaline in-utero and then through her milk. Wolves only bark as an alarm call when something very dangerous is near, so the constant barking of the other shelter dogs told the wolves to be scared of everything. After four months of constant barking, Fenris and Amulet were neurotic, horrified puppies with nowhere to go.
Through news reports and the outreach of one of the shelter’s staff, Mission:Wolf found out about the homeless pups. They agreed to take them in, hoping that their young age would allow us to socialize them. Little did they know what they were getting ourselves in to. Fenris and Amulet arrived during the summer rush at Mission:Wolf and were immediately horrified. The staff had never seen wolves as negatively imprinted by humans as these two. Fenris and Amulet spent their first months at the refuge cowering and fear barking from the very back of the enclosure.
Ambassador Wolf Maggie was introduced to the pups so that she could teach them how to be around people, and so that they could serve as companions for her as they grew. Within day of adopting the pups, Maggie retreated from all human contact. She refused to greet visitors, choosing instead to hide in her den. This arrangement just wasn’t working out for anyone. Fenris and Amulet looked to each other, rather than to Maggie, for the courage to be around people, and when they didn’t find it, they ran off even faster.
The staff then hoped that by separating the pups and giving each one an adult wolf to look up to, Fenris and Amulet would start to calm down. Amulet moved in with a male named Merlin and Fenris was adopted by Maggie’s sister, Raven. Without their sibling’s fear to feed off of, Fenris and Amulet accepted their adult companions and began to settle down.
As they have matured, it’s become apparent that they are not pure wolves. They bark more than they howl, and they have small feet and curved tails. Fenris has grown into a strikingly hansom wolf-dog with a stark black coat. Staff and visitors still only catch glimpses of him through the aspens in his enclosure, but he’s slowly coming around. Amulet has matured into a delicate and beautiful black wolf-dog with a white patch of fur on her chest and bright yellow eyes. She almost never comes up to the front of her enclosure, but she will usually come over to peer through the fence when groups go in to visit the Ambassador Wolves next door.