The Philosopher And the Wolf

Why should the pet, if it does, obey our instructions? When does punishment suppose a moral sense that is ridiculous to attribute to this other animal? What does it mean when we watch a dog, say, cavort through being a puppy and then, so much faster than we do, age and ultimately die? Are we really such different creatures?

Answering questions of this order is the mission of Englishman Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons From the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness . The pet in this case is not a dog but, true to the book's title, a wolf called Brenin. The author, a philosopher, purchases the wolf cub on something of a whim while teaching in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama. The Philosopher and the Wolf is a memoir of their relationship and a catalogue of the epiphanies and contemplations that their living together leads him to. His book is a ruminative and often challenging set of reflections about the meaning of life.

Early on, Rowlands makes an early distinction between wolves' ways of living and “simian” ways – those of the ape family to which we, as humans, belong. “Dogs,” Rowlands writes, “call out to something in the deepest recesses of a long-forgotten part of our soul ... a part of us that was there before we became apes. This is the wolf that we once were.”

In the fork of his evolutionary schema, we simians come off badly – this despite the students' lunches Brenin eats, the fights he gets into and the damage he wreaks if ever he is left alone for more than 20 minutes.

Relying in large part on the work of celebrated naturalist Frans de Waal – he of the sex-mad bonobos and our “inner ape” – Rowlands concludes that the ape family is the one less to be admired. It is less dedicated to the welfare of the group and inherently more calculating, and so capable of premeditation and, subsequently, evil.

“ What is most important when the time comes – and it always will – is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf ”

— Mark Rowlands

And what is the driver? Lust, of course, and the urge to power over our brethren. These two appetites are, to his mind, the consequence of our inversion of the importance of the reproductive function and pleasure as the actual point of sex . (A wolf may have it only once a year, and blithely.) As a result, we simians are scheming and nasty and dishonest, whereas, Rowlands says, “A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think that we are better than them.”

Rowlands is hardly the first to romanticize beasts (“Sometimes I get a feeling: it's the strangest feeling. It's that I used to be a wolf and now I'm just a stupid labrador”) and he is in a long line of thinkers using the animal world to explore the thorny question of what, if anything, distinguishes our species. It has been argued, for instance, that humans, but not animals, are capable of free will, or that we alone are the species that can imagine love and our eventual deaths.

But Rowlands will have none of these constructs in humans' favour. He sees our striving for some way to scientifically explain our superiority as an act of wishful thinking designed to explain away and excuse our dominance over animals, and our dependence on them for food.

Rowlands argues, pushing philosopher John Rawls's “original position” one step further, that even our social contract with one another fails because it is less about equality than about forgetting the weak, and it is hugely flawed because usually it does not include animals at all. Rowlands becomes a vegetarian, though his attempts to make Brenin one fail.

Alongside the moral questioning and a gamut of disturbing moments – Brenin's fights with dogs, a road accident – there are amusing ones. All those who have put up with table kegs gnawed by a normal puppy will consider themselves lucky reading about the author's destroyed living-room curtains, lacerated car interiors and, after the wolf cub scurries under the house when he is first brought home, $10,000 worth of destroyed air-conditioning pipes. Rowlands, who has “already started to tune out human beings,” is gloriously undeterred. Tending to and accepting the havoc Brenin wreaks is but a small demonstration of the loyalty he feels is the highest expression of his love for a companion he nurses through illness and eventually must euthanize.

Death, of course, is the hardest lesson and, as the wolf's final days approach, Rowlands decides that we are what we leave behind in stories, and in the changed behaviour of others – this, despite a world view that is jocular and even … well, brutal. Happiness, not purpose, and therefore the wolf's being in the moment and not the ape's future perfect, is, Rowlands decides, the point of life. He draws succour, even, from the memory of the “deep and calm and sonorous growl” that Brenin emitted once when another, stronger dog had the young wolf cub by the throat. It indicated, to him, defiance and “a recognition that pain is coming, for pain is the nature of life.”

And yet Rowlands still does not take Brenin's loss easily, and he almost drinks himself to death over the spot in France where he buries him. His eventual epiphany is that “a life lived in the rosy warmth and kindness of hope is the one any of us would choose if we could,” but that “what is most important when the time comes – and it always will – is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf ... because in the end, it is only our defiance that redeems us.”

Rowlands is not an altogether savoury person. By his own admittance, he is something of a rugby-playing, carousing womanizer who is aware, at opportune moments, that the wolf by his side adds to his cachet. (He is a simian, therefore he schemes.) It is not difficult to see how such reasoning does the English philosopher, enjoying his time as a young professor in the American Southwest, a good turn, and leads him to the curious and not altogether convincing conclusion that although the wolf (and the part of himself he sees in it) “in the right circumstances might quickly and efficiently kill your dog,” the animal has no place in a civilized society not because he is dangerous, but because he is “nowhere near dangerous, and nowhere near unpleasant, enough.”

“Civilization,” Rowlands declares, “is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.”

I'm still not sure what this actually means; elsewhere the implication is that sappy dogs, relying on humans, are wolves that have succumbed to the civilizing path, and that his own inner wolf is only latent. Neither is it clear, even in death, that Brenin has made the author a better person, though he does shack up with another simian, finally.

But there is no question that Rowlands's thoughtful and provocative memoir is an engrossing bit of story left to the rest of us, and in this much Rowlands is certainly right: Story is the only way any of us can hope to live on.