Animal Insting

Wolves are always killing things, of course, and this is because they are predatory animals.  Which means that their food doesn't come out of a can or a bag like food for dogs does.  Instead, they have to kill something like a caribou if they want to eat supper.  Usually, wolves don't kill people, and in fact, they mostly like to stay away from people.  So this is why it was very shocking when a bunch of wolves killed a woman in Alaska on Monday.

This woman's name was Candice Berner, and she was a special education teacher who went to Alaska last August because she wanted to live there for a while instead of in Pennsylvania, where she grew up.  And what happened was that Ms. Berner went out running on this road that was kind of deserted, and then later on some guys on snowmobiles found her body, which had been dragged off the road and partly eaten.

So the medical examiner did an autopsy on her -- just like on the TV show, Dr. G: Medical Examiner -- and that's how they knew for sure that some animals had killed her.  And since there were wolf tracks all around her body, and the grizzly bears are all hibernating right now, everyone was basically sure that the wolves were the guilty parties.

Anyway, now there are all these hunters and people trying to find the wolves and either kill them or capture them.   But so far, they haven't caught them, even though they have used snowmobiles and helicopters.  Probably, there were two or three wolves, and maybe even four.  In the town where this happened, which is called Chignik Lake, people have been seeing wolves lurking around recently, and the wolves keep coming closer and closer into town.  So after Ms. Berner got killed, the people got very nervous about going out alone or letting their children go out.

But like I said before, wolves don't usually attack people.  In fact, during the last 100 years, there has only been one case of wolves killing somebody in North America, and that was in 2005 when some wolves killed a geology student.  This happened in northern Saskatchewan, which is in Canada and which is also hard to spell, so I am glad I don't live there!

The wolves that did this bad thing on Monday are not evil or anything like that.  They are probably just hungry because there is a lot of snow in Alaska right now, which makes it hard to find food.  So when they saw this person running along, they thought she was some prey that they should hunt down and kill.  Because this is the way wolves (and dogs) think about warm-blooded moving things, especially when they are hungry.

Anyway, I am sorry to have to tell you another sad story, but sometimes it seems like the world is full of sad stories, and somebody has to tell them.  What we can learn from this story is that if you go out jogging, it's better to do it in a place where you won't get attacked by wolves.  Or at the very least, you should take an Irish Wolfhound along with you for protection!