MCampbell
Registered: December 2014
City/Town/Province: S. Glastonbury
Posts: 1
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Last year, my school’s All-School Theme was climate change and sustainability. This year, many students who support sustainability and taking action are working to continue the work begun last year. This past September, I worked with a group of students to bring three wolves from the Mission Wolf reserve in Colorado to campus for and educational program. In our second largest gymnasium, over 150 students and faculty gathered (completely voluntarily) to participate in the program.
Before introducing the wolves, the owner of Mission Wolf shared with the audience several amusing anecdotes, building up to, and preparing the audience for, the wolves themselves. These included lessons on how to receive the wolves without frightening them or being frightened and the lessons learned by encountering the wolves. The anticipation to finally meet the wolves seemed to stretch out this prologue, but it was most certainly informative and entertaining. The major lessons could be roughly boiled down to:
1. Be confident, but not cocky (a life lesson). Assure others you know who you are and what you are doing without being aggressive.
2. Don’t run away from a predator unless you want it to pursue you.
3. When you leave for the day and return much later, your dog’s seemingly over-enthusiastic greeting is an expression of its belief that you had died and it is now scolding you for causing it such a fright.
4. Wild wolves have a widespread effect on the ecosystem, including indirectly cooling water in streams and rivers, enabling fish to live in it--a process known as the trophic cascade.
5. Last, and most importantly, DO NOT KEEP A WOLF FOR A PET, even if you cross-breed it with a dog. Just no.
The headquarters of Mission: Wolf, located in Colorado, currently accommodates 35 wolves, although have been offered many more that had to be turned away due to limited space and resources. One of the main goals of this non-profit organization, besides to care the wolves, is to educate the populace at large about the truth of the often-vilified wolf. They are a species that has been hunted to the brink of extinction because of their predatory way of life, with extensive effects—both beneficial and detrimental--on the entire ecosystem. According to our Mission Wolf ambassadors after his experience presenting to a third grade class, people learn more in one hour-long session with real live wolves than, for example, studying them in a classroom for three months. Seeing the wolves, not only large as life, but actually alive, right in front of you, gives an appreciation and a reality to the animal, its situation and what you can do to help. The Mission: Wolf operation, sustainable down to their off-the-grid solar and wind energy production and on site agriculture to provide a portion of their food, relies mainly on volunteer manpower to keep the Mission running and operational. Whether volunteers stay for a day, a week, a year, all are welcome and put to work. The organization’s overarching goal, which can be accomplished in many ways beyond meeting wolves, is to reconnect people with nature. By bringing these wolves to my school, we offered the opportunity for all the students at my school to learn from these unique teachers and inspire them to take up the environmental stewardship of our planet.
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