A review by skylacine
Shunka: Life with an Arctic Wolf by Marika Lumi Morgan

3.5



Gosh that ending was sad. Moral of the story, don't keep wild animals as pets.

The story of the author and her husband who for a few years kept a wolf, named Shunka, as their pet. 

Overall this book is well-written and you do genuinely get the feeling that these people love this wolf and want what's best for him, but I was also rolling my eyes quite a bit throughout the story at how the wolf was treated as a pet. As we all know by now, exotics/wild animals do not make good pets. That includes wolves. 



Of course this is a pretty old book and I am looking at this through a modern lens, but I do feel bad for Shunka and what he had to endure, even if his owners clearly loved him in their own way. He never got to live life as a real wolf, even after the author and her husband sold him once he became too unruly. His only meaningful connection he ever had with another canine was his "sibling" Happy, a Newfoundland mix whom he grew up with, but after Shunka was sold he never really had another canine companion for long. Which sucks because wolves are pack animals, simply being around humans is not enough for their emotional needs to be met. 

So Shunka, while being a wild animal, lived the life of a glorified pet, never got to act like a real wolf, was alone without canine companions for a long time, had to go through several super stressful experiences, and in the end he gets killed by a hunter after he escapes from his enclosure. I just feel so bad for this poor wolf.



I will give this book a decent rating because it was genuinely interesting to read and I do appreciate the author sharing her experiences, but man, this was also hard to read at times. I'm not inherently against animals in captivity (I'm not anti-zoo for example), but they do need to be able to express their natural behaviors and be as stress-free as possible. Shunka never got that in life, and I feel bad for him.

So yeah, overall this is an interesting read, but also a cautionary one. Don't get a wolf as a pet, guys. That's literally what we bred dogs for. Even the author acknowledges later on in the book that a wolf does not make for a good pet.
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