Jim Lindsay doesn’t hold any grudges against the wolves that almost killed his family’s pet dog.
“Timber wolves were here before me,” says the farmer from Weirdale, Sask.
“They get the blame for things and get shot. They mind their own business around here.”
Lindsay said that on Dec. 28, just as it was starting to get light, he went out into his farmyard to do chores. Poopsie, the Lindsays’ five-year-old Shih Tzu-poodle cross, ran out the door behind him.
The dog, whose breed name in Chinese means lion dog, started barking and headed toward three timber wolves lurking in the yard.
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Lindsay said the family had “sicced” the dog on coyotes in the past so it may have thought it was scaring the predators off. However, the wolves grabbed the dog and shook it, tossing it about a metre in the air.
Lindsay jumped onto an all-terrain vehicle and chased the wolves, which were carrying the little dog with them. They dropped it in a field and the family rushed the dog, full of puncture marks, to the veterinarian.
Two weeks later Poopsie is up and running around, but “when the dogs start barking she comes back.”
Lindsay figured the wolves were hungry and were interested in a cow carcass on the farm. He thinks they got annoyed when the little dog yapped at them, so they grabbed it. The wolves are generally shy, but Lindsay has seen them a few times in his 50 years on the farm, located on the forest fringe.
He isn’t afraid of the wolves. It’s bears that scare him.
“They could chase me up a tree and I’m at an age that I probably couldn’t climb it.”
