The wolf man

“I was too busy trying to shoot pictures through the wire-netting fence to wonder what was going on in front of me."

“You can join me and pick up the deer cadaver,” German wolf researcher Werner Freund offered, as he climbed into his lorry. I quickly jumped in and the smell of rotten meat hit me. I thought I would stop smelling it after a while, but this proved to be a very false assumption.

We chatted while driving and he told me about his education as a gardener and his first botanical job at the Stuttgart zoo. Soon he became zookeeper for the predators, after the initial bear keeper was injured.

At the end of our drive we reached a house, not far from the French border. There lay the deer carcass in the snow, directly on the driveway. Werner asked me to give him a hand, and since he is almost 80 years old it seemed only polite to help him load the animal’s body. On the way back I told him I had never loaded or even touched a dead deer, which seemed to amuse him.

Back at his home he changed clothes so he could meet the Mongolian wolf pack with a familiar smell. I was curious. Werner opened the door of the fence and entered the enclosure. First the alpha male wolf, Heiko, came towards him and licked his mouth - a sign of acknowledgment and membership of the pack. After this ritual Werner got the deer cadaver, put it on the snowy ground, lay down and held it as if it were his prey.

As a child, like most other children, I was told the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, and that made me wary of the big bad wolf with bared teeth on display. But unexpectedly the pack was shy and approached carefully.

Werner played his role and bit into the leg of the deer but spat out the raw meat. I was too busy trying to shoot pictures through the wire-netting fence to wonder what was going on in front of me. None of the wolves competed with him for the food.

In the afternoon I met Werner at the enclosure of the Arctic wolves, and he had changed his jacket again. It was terrific watching the beautiful white animals howling in anticipation. They recognised the sound of Werner’s car and were excited long before he arrived at the gate.

“From the moment the wolf cubs taste meat and blood, they turn into predators and cannot be domesticated like dogs”, he said, entering the enclosure with a bucket of meat.

When the Arctic wolf Monty, named after the horse whisperer Monty Roberts, and the female wolf Deborah had a litter of cubs, Werner began feeding the litter from his mouth. It was incredible that the whole pack adopted this behaviour.

Werner proceeded to a small hill where the pack assembled. He made odd, muted noises to call the pack. “I had to re-educate my voice as my German dialect sounds quite hard, but the wolves are used to gentle noises”, he explained later.

He sat down and started howling. For my part, this was the absolute highlight. The light was just perfect and the wolves roamed around while he always stayed in the middle. They stopped sometimes to join in the wolf song and their breath became visible in the cold air.

“People said, I am half human“, Werner said with a canny smile later as we sat at a table in his living room having a cup of tea together. “I have always remained human,” he said.

Erika, his wife, joined in and mentioned how quickly their 50-year marriage had passed by. Back in 1972 they adopted a wolf named Ivan from Yugoslavia. Ivan was released into an enclosure and mated with a female wolf who gave birth to cubs soon after. When they visited the wolf family they had a life-changing experience.

“Ivan brought one of the cubs to us and laid it down”, Werner said, as if it had been a miracle. Apparently this was the moment when he decided to dedicate his life to the wolves. I listened to his stories about the animals, how he raised them at home, and I noticed that he used terms like muzzle and claw for his own body parts.

Werner Freund has an eventful life to look back on. If you ask him, he answers that he has two lives: “Which one I like best, I keep to myself”, he concluded before we said goodbye.