The wolf is art of the highest form and you cannot be in its presence without this lifting your spirits. No matter what sort of foul mood I was in when we began our daily run, bearing witness to that kind of silent, gliding beauty always made me feel better. It made me feel alive. More importantly, it is difficult to be around such beauty without

People say all the time that they love their dogs. And I’m sure they think they do. But, believe me, until you’ve cleaned your dog’s smelly, suppurating, disease-ridden arse every two hours for well over a month, you really don’t know.

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

When we talk about the superior intelligence of apes, the superiority of simian intelligence over lupine intelligence, we should bear in mind the terms of this comparison: apes are more intelligent than wolves because, ultimately, they are better schemers and deceivers than wolves. It is from this that the difference between simian and lupine

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.

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,

if you want to understand the soul of the wolf—the essence of the wolf, what the wolf is all about—then you should look at the way the wolf moves.

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

In comparison with the wolf, the ape is addicted to sex.