Young visitors thrilled by glances at wolves
By FRANZISKA CASTILLO
THE JOURNAL NEWS
SOUTH SALEM ý Standing at the edge of a misty grove of trees and mud yesterday, a group of suburban boys howled loudly into the rain. Then, after a moment of suspense, something from the far edge of the yard answered back.
But instead of being scared, fourth-grader Keith Harley, 9, broke into a wide smile. For the first time, he was hearing a “real live wolf,” at the Wolf Conservation Center off Route 35. The encounter was part of a field trip and party for children from the Westhab Family Center, an Elmsford shelter.
By the end of the day, after watching volunteer Janine Bartko, 35, feed a pack of gray wolves treats made of dehydrated lamb lung through a fence, Keith declared himself a definite conservationist.
Of course, that was after learning the reassuring fact that no healthy wolf has ever attacked a human in North America.
“We need to learn about animals so the animals won’t be endangered,” Keith said.
Bartko could hardly have hoped for a better response. Since August, she has been working with groups of Westchester and Connecticut adults and children at the center to foster positive attitudes toward wolves and nature.
Many of the visitors, like yesterday’s group, live in highly populated areas, she said. There, the wildest creatures they see are usually squirrels or pigeons, and their only impressions of wolves often come from cartoons depicting the creatures as sinister beasts.
Bartko and center director Barry Braden believe introducing children to the center’s “ambassador” wolves ý Kaila, Apache, Lukas and Atka ý can change fear of animals into love.
“If we can convince people here that wolves and other animals are worth saving, when these kids grow up, they will want to protect wildlife,” Braden said.
After watching a slide show explaining wolf behavior yesterday, the children delighted in getting close to the animals.
“They are cool,” said Dajene Mahoney, 11, after sitting only two feet from Atka, a majestic 2-year-old white Arctic wolf. He would have liked to have seen a leopard, he said, but wolves were interesting too because “they’re important to the environment.”
While up to 250,000 wolves once roamed parts of North America, including New York, the animals were almost entirely killed off after European settlers arrived here, Braden said.
Most Native American tribes revered the wolf, but the Europeans came from an agrarian culture, which caused them to see wolves as a dangerous threat to their livestock. Just 10 years after the Mayflower landed in 1620, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was already offering a reward for every wolf killed, and a brutal campaign against the animals began. Wolves were sometimes fed glass or blown up with dynamite, Bartko said.
Today, only 4,000 wolves are left in the Lower 48 states, she said, and only 500 Mexican gray wolves survive, all of them in captivity. The drop in population affects all the animals in the wolves’ habitat, Braden said, including deer, whose numbers are no longer controlled by wolves’ hunting.
Part of the center’s goal is to breed more wolves to be released back into the wild, Braden said. They are waiting for mates for the three female Mexican gray wolves at the center, in hopes that future cubs can bring the species back from the brink of extinction.
As far as Kaveh Watts, 10, is concerned, more wolves would be great.
After pizza and cake at the center yesterday, Kaveh admitted he had been a little nervous about seeing the animals up close. “They were big,” he said, his brown eyes growing wide. But, he added, “I want to keep them safe.”