2 Women Howling Wild About Wolves, Determined to Save Them : New Mexico: Candy Kitchen Wolf Hybrid Rescue Ranch shelters the animals, many of them rejected pets. Proprietor compares canine to a 150-pound house cat with very large teeth and little patience with humans.

Jacque Evans starts the howling, turning her chin to the blue sky over this patch of western New Mexico and letting loose a long, high-pitched, “Ah-ooooo.”

With no prodding, Evans’ business partner, Barbara Berge, chimes in with her own “ah-ah-ah-oooo.”

Within seconds, these Zuni mountains are alive with the sounds of two middle-age women and most of a 36-member wolf pack howling into the winds with primeval energy.

Evans and Berge laugh wildly. It’s another good day at the Candy Kitchen Wolf Hybrid Rescue Ranch.

Here, about 18 miles south of the village of Ramah on a strip of private land wedged between the Ramah Navajo reservation and Zuni Pueblo, Evans and Berge run one of the largest refuges for unwanted wolves and wolf-dog hybrids in the nation.

On 22 acres of tall ponderosa and rolling hills dotted with long cages made of 8-foot-high chain-link fence, the wolves and wolf-dogs pace and snooze in the sun. They come from as far away as New Jersey, Michigan and California, delivered by exasperated owners and animal humane associations that will not adopt them out.

They wind up here because purebred wolves and wolves bred with domestic dogs, so cuddly when pups, make trying pets when grown up.

Pet owners attracted by the beauty of the animals and their grace and majesty often are ill-prepared for the huge independent creatures that inhabit their yards once the puppy fat has melted away.

Berge compares a grown wolf or wolf-dog to a 150-pound house cat with very large teeth. It is curious and independent and has little patience with an owner who attempts to train it.

“They are not dogs,” Evans said. “They shall never be dogs.”

Berge, 52, and Evans, 64, have been running the rescue operation for about 18 months. As a division of the nonprofit Wildlife Education and Research Foundation, the ranch exists on donations.

The canines range in pedigree from close to 100% wolf to less than 50%. But the animals share the distinctive characteristics of wolves. They have long lanky legs, narrow faces, powerful jaws and yellow eyes with a piercing gaze. They don’t bark, and they share that distinctive howl.

The women’s mission is to save animals being abused or neglected by owners who can’t handle them and animals that shelters cannot adopt out and intend to kill. The women also nurse abused wolves and hybrids back to health.

They also attempt to teach people the differences between a wolf and a dog and discourage the inbreeding that has led to an estimated 300,000 animals in the United States and Canada that are part wolf and part dog.

“It just breaks my heart,” Berge said. “I wish we could stop the breeding.”

The problems of interbreeding and selling hybrid pups as pets arise when the animals reach 18 months to 2 years of age. People who have paid $300 to $400 for puppies expect their grown animals to act like dogs. Instead, a mature wolf hybrid begins jumping fences as high as 6 feet and digging and chewing everything in sight.

“They will take apart the couch to see what’s inside. They will dig up everything in the yard. They may kill a neighbor’s dog or cat,” Berge said.

A domesticated wolf or wolf hybrid attacks and kills a small child somewhere in the United States on average of once every two years, according to statistics kept by the Humane Society of the United States.

Because the movements of children’s play can trigger a wolf hybrid’s hunting instinct, responsible owners don’t allow children near the animals unless the pet is one a leash and children are kept at a distance, the women say. And the animals never can be allowed to run free.

“They can be the most gentle of animals and the fiercest,” Evans said. “They’re master predators.”

The possession of purebred wolves is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Regulations covering hybrids vary from area to area, ranging from no regulations to the requirement that owners have an exotic animal permit.

While some people are willing to rearrange their lives and build expensive pens to happily coexist with a hybrid, many frustrated pet owners put the animal on a chain or discipline it as they would a dog, which worsens the wolf’s behavior.

“The person then has an animal that doesn’t care for the person who is keeping it and an animal they think misbehaves,” Berge said.

Pet owners often dump the hybrids in the country, try to give them away or take them to humane associations.

While the 36 hybrids play four or five to a cage, with plenty of room to dig and romp, Evans and Berge have plans to fence a full acre of land and create a pen that would give their four full-blooded Canadian timber wolves room to roam in a more natural environment.

Evans and Berge willingly take Isis, an exceptionally sociable hybrid, to visit schools around the state to dispel the myth of the big bad wolf. And they welcome visitors who come looking for some connection to the mythical aura of the wild wolf.

Despite the isolation of the ranch, visitors come. A hogan-shaped visitors’ center is filled with books and pamphlets that tell about wild wolves and caution against breeding wolves with dogs.

“Education,” Evans said. “That’s the only thing that’s going to save the wild wolf.”