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>A lot of Freepers have an almost medieval fear & hatred for wolves. I think they read too many fairytales growing up.

LOL. I grew up with two wolves as pets. The thing is, they are essentially two animals trapped in one body. One is kind of dog like, though not as emotional in some ways, and more distant and logical. The other is really just like Arnold’s Terminator, and just as frightening.

The thing is, they are social animals in the pack. But they also have to eat, and the chance to eat might just be a rabbit that pops out unexpectedly as they are trotting along, and when that happens, they need to kill it immediately.

What that evolutionary pressure does is create an animal that is social and nice when things are calm, but let anything stimulating happen, and like a light switch, you have a furry killing machine.

One of those wolves was very nice, a girl, and we got on well. When wolves want to walk fast, they do a sort of flicking thing with their wrists which causes them to kind of float on the ground, without moving their upper legs too much. They can move really fast that way. I was bringing her back from a walk, and she began floating, and I had her on a leash, because if she ever got loose, there was no telling how much she would kill in the neighborhood rampage if she got excited.

So I am running behind her, and she is floating in front, but she is moving so fast, I can’t keep up, so she begins drifting left and right in front of me as we go. Suddenly she slowed and I stopped my lower body to not hit her, but that was it, I fell. The fall was hard, and tripped her surprise button, and as I went to get up, in an instant, I felt her neck pressing down on the back of my neck, her chin on my back, and the vibration of her really worked up growl went right through the back of my neck into my shoulders.

I didn’t need to know what her eyes looked like as her chin pressed down on me. They would have been completely blank and cold, like a shark’s. I had seen her like this before, and the “dog personality” was gone. There was no thought, or person there. Just a violent robot that would uncontrollably go super violent once the violence began to feel exciting, like if I pushed against her and tried to get up. That mode was robotically rageful. It was a really bad spot.

I had dealt with her for years, from a little puppy, so I knew her inside and out, which is what saved me. I did not push up, or excite her surprise or fight buttons. Instead, I rolled on my side, like a Roman about to eat some grapes, relaxed like my life depended on it, and pretended nothing was unusual, and casually looked around like I was bored.

When I finally looked up at her, she looked down on me with those ice cold eyes, then looked a little confused, her tensed-up body relaxed just a little, and she took a second to reaccess what was going on. In that instant, the dog came back in, and she got even more confused, turned to the side and shook hard to get rid of the stress, and then I got up and took her back in the house.

That wolf liked me, but I really was about 50-50 on living, because if she went into attack mode, she had my neck right there, and once she entered attack mode, that would have been it.

I love animals, and still love wolves, so long as they are calm and in dog mode (though I wouldn’t get another).

But if I had a flock of little harmless animals of some kind that loved me, and a pack of those killing machines was coming and killing all of them in the wild lethal frenzy they kill in, I would fully understand an animal lover killing them by any means. It isn’t really a moral thing, so much as it is a loyalty thing with respect to your own animals. If you have a little goat who looks up at you with love, and some other killing machine which will destroy it, there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t take the side of what it is that loves them.

And I will say, I had a farmer who had cows near a place I stayed as a kid. They are really beautiful personalities. I mean I would rate them more human-like and unconditionally loving than the wolf I wrote about above. They will even lick your face as a sign of love.

The other wolf was a lower percentage, so it was far more dog like, and it actually would never have hurt me and was blindly loyal and loving. But I think that was the dog in it, and not the wolf. Either that, or it was just unique. The vast majority of wolves and wolf-hybrids have the mental trigger, just because that is how they evolved. It is why so many don’t work out as pets. That girl nearly killed everyone in my family growing up at one time or another, and almost killed another dog too. I saved the other dog by a second or two with fast thinking when she got to it once.

But yeah, those fairy tales about the big bad wolf are not entirely wrong. There is something even more deadly inside most wolves, even the domesticated ones.