The Philosopher and the Wolf

Something had already started; a process that would become more and more pronounced as the years rolled on. I was already starting to tune out human beings. When you have a wolf, they take over your life in a way that a dog seldom does. And human company gradually becomes less and less significant for you.

You should have seen the looks on the faces of my three canines when I started dividing up the pains au chocolat each morning. The quivering anticipation, the rivers of saliva, the concentration so intense it almost bordered on the painful. As far as they were concerned, it could be pains au chocolat from here to eternity. For them, the moment thei

The ape is the tendency to have not friends, but allies. The ape does not see its fellow apes; it watches them. And all the while it waits for the opportunity to take advantage. To be alive, for the ape, is to be waiting to strike. The ape is the tendency to base relationships with others on a single principle, invariant and unyielding: what can yo

That night marked the beginning of our gradual withdrawal from the world of humans. This world—and I have to be honest about this—had begun to disgust me. It disgusted me that there was, in effect, a shoot-to-kill policy on Brenin. It disgusted me that I had to be a running man—constantly ready to pack my bags and take flight. These thoughts were,

I always judge a person by how they treat those who are weaker than them.

For Brenin, playing amounted to seizing the other animal by the neck and pinning it to the ground. There he would proceed to shake it violently back and forth, like a rag doll. And all of this would be carried on against a background cacophony of growling and snarling. Then he would allow the other dog to wriggle free and do much the same thing to

We demean the fox when we think of its natural behaviour as restricted to hunting mice. We demean its intelligence and its resourcefulness when we adopt such a restrictive conception of, as Sartre would put it, its being. What is

Malice aforethought saturates so many simian interactions that one cannot help but conclude it is an endemic feature of the simian character. In fact, perhaps the single greatest contribution apes have made to the world—the single defining contribution for which they will always be remembered—is the invention of malice aforethought. If the reversal

And so I kept running, and Brenin kept running with me; and we both got fitter, and leaner, and harder. This pragmatic impetus for my new-found fitness, however, quickly changed into something else. On our runs together, I realized something both humbling and profound: I was in the presence of a creature that was, in most important respects, unques