Science: Man Bites Wolf

Biologist Benson Ginsburg bites wolves. Not that the University of Chicago professor gets a special kick from his odd occupation; his dangerous pastime is part of a serious scientific effort to discover if wildness can be bred out of wild animals. Starting with wild mice, he has worked up through coyotes to wolves, which are notoriously hard to gentle. Today, in laboratory pens, or loping around a one-acre enclosure at the Chicago Zoo, are five golden-eyed monsters that Dr. Ginsburg has raised from fuzzy pups. They are strong enough to kill a moose, but they play with Dr. Ginsburg’s nine-year-old daughter without ever taking a nibble.

Ritual Bite. Sometimes a wolf appears to be eating Dr. Ginsburg, but its play bites are only a ritualistic greeting. Wolves say hello, explains Ginsburg, by nipping each other’s muzzles. So he greets his research subjects the same way. “We sniff at each other,” he says, “and then the wolf takes my face in his jaws. I bite him back, but since my jaws aren’t big enough, I bring my hands up to grasp his muzzle. This seems to be satisfactory.”

At a meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in Corvallis, Ore., Dr. Ginsburg made a sociological report on his wolf friends. He considers them highly social and intelligent, and the friendliest ones are those that get most human attention at an early age. Wolf puppies that have less contact with people are likely to turn savage when they grow up. Most of Dr. Ginsburg’s wolves are uncannily bright. They have learned to work switches and faucets; their cages must be fitted with locks operated from outside lest they unfasten the inside latches and roam the lab building.

Mood For Love. Wolves have a rigid social order that hampers their love life. In Dr. Ginsburg’s colony there are two adult males, one of which is dominant and seems to have the responsibility for group safe ty. One of the three females bosses the other two, and this year only she mated.

She made brazen advances to the dominant male, but was rebuffed each time.

After a while she switched her favors to the secondary male. He showed the proper interest, but whenever he tried to respond to her mood, the boss male attacked him.

The romance was consummated only aft er the boss male’s attention strayed, and then the boss female kept the other females from mating with either male.

In some of his experiments Dr. Ginsburg has treated wild animals with a tranquilizing drug in hope of making them more tractable. The prescription worked well enough with coyotes but not with wolves, which became even more aggressive and harder to control. Now Ginsburg and his students have installed a loud speaker in the wolves’ quarters and are playing tape-recorded classical music that is free of the high-pitched tones that irritate wolves. They hope that this treatment will tranquilize the wolves and also the lab’s neighbors, who object to the animals’ blood-chilling howls.