5 - Wolves Behind Bars

Summary

In 1830, the Magazine of Natural History published an article about a wolf in the Parisian Jardin des Plantes whose ‘hair [was] perfectly black and sh[one] like floss silk’. According to the article, the wolf was not only beautiful, but also tame. Presented to Baron Cuvier's daughter-in-law ‘when very young’, the animal had been given ‘a dog for a companion’ and ‘fed entirely on broth and cooked meat’. Now fully grown, the wolf reportedly retained ‘all his gentleness and docility’ and exhibited great fidelity to his female owner. ‘[H]e never sees [Madame Cuvier] but he stretches his paws through the bars [of his cage] to be shaken, and when she lets him loose, he lies down before her, licks her feet, and shows every mark of joy and affection’ (Anon. 1830, 2).

Thirty-eight years later the Liverpool Evening Post related a much more gruesome story involving a captive wolf. On this occasion, a correspondent of the Post was walking through the Zoological Gardens in Dublin's Phoenix Park when he was ‘startled by the screams of a number of persons’. Hastening towards the sound, the man and his walking companions beheld a scene which ‘none of us can ever forget’. Next to a cage at the top of a hill stood a man, ‘who appeared to belong to the labouring class’. The man's arm was inside the cage, which contained two wolves, and ‘his hand, from the wrist down, was seized in [one of the wolves’] jaws’. Anxious ‘to succour the poor fellow from the wolf 's fangs’, a policeman ‘was beating the predator on the head with his baton’, but ‘he would have made just as much impression with his blows on a block of granite’. Only when Zoo director Dominic Corrigan arrived on the scene was the victim extricated from the wolf 's grasp – a feat achieved by ‘jerking the thin end of [the policeman’s] baton up against the roof of the brute's mouth’ to force it open.