A glimpse of the future of Texas wolves in a Navasota sanctuary

A century and half ago, there were tens of thousands of wolves running throughout Texas.

The last wild wolves were seen in the late 20th century, when a pair were killed in West Texas.

Today, hundreds of wolves and wolfdogs are bred and kept illegally as pets in the state. Owners of these animals often don’t anticipate the resources necessary to care for these animals: an adult wolf can eat up to 20 pounds of meat in a single meal, they require ample territory and areas to den, and importantly they aren’t bred to socialize with humans.

Nicole Rogers, president and executive director of the Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary, estimates that as many as 90% of these pets are euthanized before they’re three years old. She says the Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary seeks to help these animals.

Based in the piney woods of Navasota, Saint Francis has offered a sanctuary to wolves and wolfdogs for almost 25 years. They focus on providing life-long care to “non-releasable” animals, Rogers said. Those are the animals born in captivity, who missed out on essential life skills in their puphoods and couldn’t survive in the wild.

Texas used to be home to two wolf species, red and gray. Rogers says that as a keystone species, a healthy wild wolf population is essential for ecological stability.

“What I want people to know about wolves is that they are the only apex keystone predator in the United States that can not only restore and maintain an environmental ecosystem, but also engineer it,” Rogers says.

“Engineering wolves” might plant a funny image in your head, maybe of wolves with PPE. While they don’t exactly recognize OSHA, wolf activity materially impacts the operation of their environment.

Rogers says wolves respond to prey populations overeating areas.

“Wolves will not only cull that population until it’s healthy,” she says, “but they’ve also been shown to herd those populations, let’s say, out of a valley that’s being over eaten. They den there so those prey animals won’t come back, and it allows that valley to regenerate, rebuild its soil, rebuild its pollinators. That is engineering.”

In ecology, this is known as a “trophic cascade.” Studies suggest wolf predation on other engineering species, such as beavers, can alter the creation of wetlands, which affects everything from the water cycle to forest succession.

“There were wolves native to Texas,” says Rogers. “We had both red and gray wolf all over our state, from the Panhandle, deep south shores of Galveston, and all the way to Big Bend.”

That was until they were hunted out. 

“There’s a fancy scientific word for that, it’s called extirpated,” says Rogers. “Texas has been extirpated from wolf.”

Not all the wolves at Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary would have been native to Texas. Instead, they’re consequences of the pet trade: tundra, timber, even wolf-dog hybrids.

“Unfortunately, the illegal breeding and ownership of wolf and wolfdogs as pets is still a very unfortunate thing that’s happening in the state of Texas,” says Rogers. 

“All the wolves that we save here at the sanctuary were born in captivity. That is why they’re non-releasable. If you buy a wolf or wolfdog as a pet, and then it becomes too much for you to handle and you dump it in the woods thinking it’ll be fine, it’s a wolf, it’ll slowly starve to death like a dog,” says Rogers. “Wolves do not instinctually know how to hunt or to eviscerate prey. That is taught to them by their packs when they are yearlings —so between one-year and two-years old.”

Wolves born in captivity simply don’t know how to hunt, Rogers stressed. “They’ve generally had DoorDash every day of their life,” she said.

The Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary began in 2002 by its founder, a British-born woman named Jean LeFevre. Just outside of her and her Texan husband’s Montgomery home, animal control officers found a timber wolf in a trap.

Rogers said the trap likely wasn’t laid for the animal — timber wolves were never native to the area. Instead, this animal most likely escaped from an illegal wolf collection. 

LeFevre built the original sanctuary so the timber wolf could be legally transferred to her. The she-wolf, known as Mystery, lived there for 14 years. LaFevre passed in 2020.

The sanctuary was the only USDA-licensed sanctuary for wolf and wolfdogs in the state until this year, when Twin Rivers Wolf Sanctuary in Iola, Texas secured its license. Saint Francis moved to a new, 15-acre property along the way, with a current 16-animal capacity. 

“Right now at Saint Francis, we have six full-wolves and four wolfdogs,” said Rogers. 

“We have so many people at the end of the tour going, ‘I thought I owned a wolf or a wolfdog.’ Then they realized by the end that they didn’t, because their animal is not meeting those necessary physical characteristics of being a wolf or wolfdog,” said Rogers.

The first and most apparent trait, Rogers said, was the eyes. 

Courtesy of the Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary

“It is genetically impossible for a wolf or a wolfdog to have any other eye color than gold,” she said. “If you’re looking at brown, blue, black, gray, or green eyes, there is no wolf content in that animal.”

Wolves also always have rounded ears. “They are never, ever pointed at the top,” Rogers said. “Wolves have really dense hair inside their ears, you’re never going to see the pink inside of a wolf’s ear.”

“Wolves have much more narrow chests than dogs because they live in dens, they have to collapse their whole big body down into that den,” Rogers said. “Wolves’ legs are very long and lanky, tucked up underneath that narrow chest at a 90 degree angle, which means that when a wolf is standing in front of you, it is called ‘cubbing.’ Their front two paws and their front forearms are going to be very close together.”

This contrasts with a dog’s wide chest and splayed stance, the result of selective breeding for different tasks. Tracking game, herding livestock, guarding property, pulling heavy loads — thousands of years of evolution have caused their bodies to diverge dramatically from their wolf relatives.

“If I’m looking at a wolf from the tip of its nose to the top of its forehead, there is just a straight, bone-curved slope,” said Rogers. “What there is not is a stop where the nasal cavity meets the forehead. All human beings have that, and so do all dogs.”

“We like to say here, Little Red Riding Hood lied, because when the wolf puts on grandma’s glasses, those glasses stay on the nose,” Rogers added. “Nope! They would slide right off if it was a wolf. So, we know it was really just a dog in the woods.”

Another thing Rogers says the public tends to get wrong about wolves is their social dynamics.

Packs are families, composed of a mated pair and their pups. While the pups could be from multiple litters, there will not be unrelated wolves in the group. The idea of the “alpha wolf” comes from a now-debunked study on captive wolf populations; the concept’s originator, David Mech, has worked tirelessly to correct the misconception. 

Courtesy of the Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary

Instead of an alpha wolf, there is a parent who has a slight dominance in decisions. “It’s not a heavy dominance, it’s not a dictatorship,” Rogers said. “It’s just that there’s one wolf that, when everything has been considered, goes: ‘all right, we’re gonna do this,’ and everybody feels safe with that decision making.”

Rogers said that in the vast majority of packs, the smaller female is usually the dominant parent. 

“It’s not based on size, gender or strength,” said Rogers. It’s based on which wolf has the most anxiety.”

Rogers says that’s because the larger males know they could overpower their partner, but acquiesce that dominance for both survival, and for love.

“It’s loving,” said Rogers. “‘Alright little bit, I see you’re not going to feel safe with me unless I let you make the final decision.’ That’s the loving part.”

The second part, survival, comes as part of wolves’ need for a pack to successfully hunt. 

“If she doesn’t feel safe in the bond, she’s not going to bond with him,” Rogers said. “If she does not bond with him, he’s not going to thrive. He needs a bonded mate to be able to have a partner for life, as well as to keep hunting. And she needs the same thing.”

Wolves aren’t exactly the creatures of the night Hollywood would have you believe. They’re corpuscular, which means they’re most active at sundown and sunrise.

“That’s when we hear them howl the most,” said Rogers. They’ll also howl at a siren, she added.

“They also do a lot of huffing and gruffing, and if they feel threatened, they will do an alarm howl, which doesn’t sound like the typical howl,” Rogers said. 

While Rogers said picking her favorite wolf was like asking to pick a favorite child, she did mention their newest addition at the time, a black-phase gray wolf named North.

“I will say I have an inordinately large spot for our newest rescue, North. He is just an amazing, full-black wolf, and we’ve had to teach him a lot of wolf behaviors: how to dig, how to seek shade, how to feel comfortable in a den. That’s because he came from a very isolated living situation, which is unusual for a wolf,” Rogers said. “Having to teach him how to do these things, while still not going in his enclosure with him because we want him to live as wildly as he can, we’re going to treat him as the apex carnivore he is, has been a little bit of a challenge. But now he’s thriving, and he’s doing really well. That’s really made me proud to know that we are giving him the kind of care that he needs, and teaching him the skills that he needs to know as a wolf.”

Rogers stressed that Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary is a sanctuary first — while the nonprofit is primarily supported by its education programs and tours, it is not open to the public like a traditional zoo. 

Currently, the sanctuary is in phase one of a three-phrase development plan. By phase three, Rogers hopes the sanctuary will be able to house as many as 36 wolves and wolfdogs. 

“My goal is for especially our younger generations, who are going to decide whether [wolves] exist in this country or not, to understand that without the wolf in healthy populations in the United States, our ecosystem is in danger of crashing,” she said. “If it crashes, we will go along with it.”

If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.