Helen and Shaun

“I’m not nutty, and neither is Shaun,” was Helen Jeffs’s description of herself and her boyfriend, and indeed they aren’t; they’re both incredibly interesting people with an admirable single-mindedness in their dedication to wolves.

The first part of this new two-part documentary on Five was a fascinating insight into the life and work of the so-called ‘wolf man’ Shaun Ellis and his partner Helen Jeffs, but the main focus of the film was Shaun’s remarkable relationship with wolves, several of which he keeps captive in Combe Martin Wildlife Park, Devon. He doesn’t do so because he wants them as pets, he does so because otherwise, they’d be dead.

Shaun has been living in a house directly outside the compound where the wolves are housed for more than seven years and the project in Devon is the culmination of a lifetime spent in the study and care of wild animals of all kinds but he’s worked specifically with wolves since 1990. Before that, he studied the red fox species in the UK, and then coyotes in Canada…

One of the main focal points last night was that Shaun – who looks more than a little lupine himself – needed to integrate Helen into his wolf ‘pack’. He told her this would involve rolling around in the mud, having her face “nuzzled”, regurgitating rabbit liver – in order to prove she could provide for any new babies who may come along – and generally demonstrate that she wasn’t afraid…

The fact is though that she was putting her life in Shaun’s hands and relying entirely on his position within the pack to ensure that she wasn’t ripped to pieces. In fact, near the end of the episode, Shaun had to enter the compound to sort out some status-related dispute within the pack and emerged with multiple and nasty looking face wounds. Understandably, Helen was wide with fear over the aggression and potential lethality of the ‘fight’ but the fact remains, Shaun would, I believe, lay down his life for his pack.

Shaun was raised on a farm in Norfolk which is where he began his love affair with wild animals and would spend endless hours simply observing foxes and badgers in particular. He first trained to be a gamekeeper in Norfolk but left the job when the Head gamekeeper discovered that Shaun planned to release animals that the Head gamekeeper had caught – and intended to kill – back into the wild.

In something of a radical career change, he then joined the Royal Marines but left after he met a Native American biologist at a wolf seminar. That meeting was to lead to Shaun spending seven years living with the ‘Nez Perce’ Native Americans on their reservation in northern Idaho as a volunteer in a project studying wolves in the Rocky Mountains.

It was here that Shaun learned how to observe wolves and for the first time, he was able to integrate into a pack of wolves and live among them. It was also during this time that he recorded wild wolf calls and gradually learned to identify individual pack members by the sound of their howls. He soon realised that wolves are highly intelligent and instinctive animals that exhibit total trust within their pack’s social structure.

In 2005, Shaun spent eighteen months living quite literally in captivity at Combe Martin Wildlife Park with three abandoned wolf pups, Yana, Tamaska and Matsi, teaching them how to be wild wolves – or at least, as wild as they could be – by becoming the small pack’s alpha male and showing the cubs how to live as they would naturally. Here’s a clip of Shaun teaching a cub how to howl…

Shaun stated that he’d like to see wild wolves reintroduced into England, where they’ve been extinct since the 17th century when the last wolves were killed. He said, “Although many people refer to wolves as savage killers, I’ve come to know and love them as family” and what an amazing family they are! It must be an amazing privilege to live as he does among such dignified and graceful animals and have their acceptance and love.

And his astounding affinity with the animals and his skills with them have meant that he was able to literally save the livelihood of a farmer in Poland who was losing stock wholesale to attacks from a pack of wolves there.

In Poland, wolves are a protected species so the farmer had to try to find a way to stop the attacks without hurting the wolves, so Shaun tried played a recording of wolf howls and calls in the hope that the pack would then believe the farm had been ‘claimed’ by a rival pack and would therefore stay away. It worked and soon, the pack was staying away from the farm and the farmer could once again rest knowing his stock were safe.

We then saw Shaun going home to Devon, his Polish mission accomplished, but now, he had to reintegrate himself with the three wolves he’d raised from cubs. However, while he was gone, the small pack had established a new hierarchy, and although they recognised Shaun and “welcomed” him back, where he was once the alpha male – or literally ‘top dog’ – as far as the pack was concerned, he was now relegated to somewhere between the beta and the omega male, which basically meant that he was somewhere between being the lowest ranking male and the ‘peacekeeper’ of the pack.

It was all fascinating stuff and if you missed it, I highly recommend you try to catch it again on Five’s catch up service.

Just by the by, Shaun featured in the first episode of Martin Clunes’ recent show, A Man and His Dogs. Martin visited Shaun in Devon as part of his attempt to discover what ‘binds’ wolves with pet dogs. In the show, Shaun revealed that a lot of domestic dog behaviour – which is interpreted as being influenced by humans – is in fact inherent in their genetic make-up and reflects the wolf’s hierarchical pack instincts.

You can read all about Shaun, Helen and of course, the wolves, on his website, Wolfpack Management.

You can see the final part next Tuesday at 8:00pm on Five.