Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Wolf Moon

December moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The Moon is new! The longest night has passed, a new lunar month has begun, and we are on the cusp of a new year. We have returned to the lunar cycle known as the Wolf moon, and now is a powerful time to make new moon/new year wishes. I like the idea of wishes better than resolutions. It's not that I'm lazy and want things to come to me without having to work for them. It's just that 'wishes' acknowledge the mysteries of life, the fact that we can't know or understand all the factors that influence outcomes. 'Resolutions' are all about will and will power, about how we can control what will happen if only our discipline is steadfast enough... But I grow weary of the over-inflated human will, and I think the universe works in much more subtle ways. Wishes set our intentions, and have a profound influence on what we work for, but also say "Thy will be done." They are like prayers: powerful and humble at the same time.

This was called the Wolf Moon in old farmers almanacs, and it was a time of year when farmers and ranchers living far from the cities could hear the wolves howling in the distance. It is a sound that is very rarely heard any longer, a call of the wild that must have been haunting and magical, frightening and awe-inspiring on a cold winter night.

In our so-civilized world, the wolves are too scarce and too distant to be heard by most of us, but there are still vestiges of their howling.

When fire engines sound loudly in our suburban neighborhood, there are a few dogs that can't resist the call of their wolf ancestors and start their instinctual howling in synch with the rise and fall of the siren. Our dog is one of these that lifts his little furry head, makes his little black lips into a round "ooo", and howls. It is a sight to see and a sound to hear, and my partner and I can sometimes be found howling ourselves in hopes of persuading him to chime in. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't.

As rare as the wolves are nowadays, their modern-day descendants -- dogs -- are everywhere in our urban and suburban lives. I must admit that I am an incorrigible dog-lover. I adore these half-wild, half-domestic beasts that share our homes and our furniture, our parks and our city streets. But I also recognize that these companions are a mixed blessing for the planet.

I have come to believe that the best diet for dogs is the one that most closely resembles the diet of their wild ancestors -- one that has a generous proportion of raw meaty bones -- and there is a growing movement to feed canines this biologically-appropriate diet. But the implications of this for our food system aren't trifling.

Some people espouse the view that people should eat a plant-based diet because they believe the planet simply doesn't have the resources to support a growing population of meat-eating humans. I don't subscribe to this view. In my opinion it fails to account for both the fact that humane, small-scale ranching can actually make a positive contribution to the Earth's food system and the fact that there are many areas of the planet better suited to grazing than to farming. I also believe that animal protein is a crucial part of human nutrition, and that if we are going to thrive as a species we will need to find ways to produce it that are ecologically sustainable. It might mean that our descendants are eating lots of bugs, but I hope not. I do have to wonder, though, whether we can raise enough animal protein to feed not only all the human omnivores but all of their domesticated carnivorous pets. And can we raise it without feedlots and factories? I cannot help but ponder, as I feed my dog a meaty bone from a free-range cow, lamb, or chicken, how many families would love to use that same bone to make a pot of soup, but can't afford it. When I lived in Thailand it was commonly said that "American dogs live better than Thai people."

It was a chilling phrase that has stuck with me for more than a decade.

Dogs impact our food system in other ways as well. A couple of weeks ago, my partner and I happened to find a night we could steal to go camping for a quick, 24-hour escape. We went to one of our favorite campgrounds, less than an hour from San Francisco. Of course our dog came with us. The rains had begun and we had a wet time of it, but wonderful. We had the campground almost to ourselves, and took long walks through the redwoods with our umbrellas. The creek that runs through the campground was running fast and high with the rains and our dog, a passionate swimmer, was straining at the leash to go jump in.

But he isn't allowed in that creek because it is a spawning ground for salmon -- one that biologists have been endeavoring to restore so that salmon who were born there find it an hospitable place to return, year after year. And spawning season had just begun.

Many forces have devastated the spawning and running cycles of native wild salmon, including dams, agricultural runoff, and irrigation diversion, so dogs are not the worst of their problems. But in a park's creek such as this one, dogs can disrupt the habitat, scare the salmon, and crush the nest and its delicate eggs. So we kept the dog on leash and consoled ourselves with sitting atop a bridge and watching the creek running in the hopes of seeing a salmon in that clear cool water.

We wondered how we would see it if it came -- would it be underwater? Would it swim right by, unnoticed? We kept our eyes peeled.

Scientists had arranged fallen trees and branches in the stream below us to help create the right kind of habitat, and we watched the water that coursed between them. The dog let out an occasional whimper, impatient with all this stillness and waiting. The rain drizzled, and we propped up our umbrellas over us against the railing of the bridge to keep us dry as we waited and watched and waited. And then we saw movement, a dramatic churning in the distance where the water had been still before. We looked down into the movement, and then we saw them -- two of them. Two large beautiful salmon moving under the crystal clear water, against the natural flow, upstream. One was orange, the other was gray: a male and a female, together, looking for a place to spawn in that little creek, in that little park, not too far from our home.

It was a magical moment. It was a gift to be witness to those majestic wild animals, doing what they have done for thousands of years, and what they will go on doing as long as the world is enough in balance.

If the streams flow to the ocean and spill out there, if the water is clean and clear, and if there are pockets of habitat left undisturbed, the salmon will go on swimming upstream. They will find a good spot and clear a little nest (called a redd) in the riverbed. The female will lay her thousands of eggs, and then the male will release its milt on top of the eggs and some of them will fertilize. If just a few of these salmon survive their years in the ocean and then make it back later to spawn and begin the cycle over again, salmon populations can continue to remain healthy.

It was no wonder to me when I saw that majestic pair that salmon have been held sacred by the peoples on this continent who depended on them for food, long before Europeans arrived. We should hold them in no less regard today. Putting them in seabound feedlots where they are given daily doses of antibiotics and fed dye to keep them pink, where they can't swim freely or follow any of their instincts -- this is a disgrace and an offense against nature. All our salmon should be wild and free and we should do whatever we can to protect the places where they reproduce -- even if it means denying our dogs a coveted swim.

One of the fishermen at our farmers market returned with frozen wild salmon from Alaska, which he had caught from his small boat. He also had a kind of salmon jerky, dried in little nuggets, that he sells as dog treats. I bought a bag of these and our dog loves them -- jumps high into the air and eats them out of my hand. He has no idea in how many ways he is connected to that great fish, or how we are all interconnected on this planet through our food system and in so many other ways. Or maybe he does know -- who am I to tell?

All I do know is that I want a world where wolves and salmon, people and dogs, all have a place. Let the dogs in our lives remind us of the wildness from whence they came many millennia ago, and the wildness they still carry inside them. Do we really want a world where everything is domesticated, where every wild thing submits to our human will? I don't think so. We want to know that salmon have the chance to follow their instincts, and we love to hear the howls of the neighborhood dogs to the sirens that sound out danger. And even if we can't hear the wolves any longer, we want to know that they are out there somewhere in the darkness at the edge of civilization. We need that wildness in the world, and it is well worth protecting. And we need that wildness in ourselves, too, the memory of moons and mysteries, places beyond reason and resolution.

Wishing you a moment of contact with the wild on this Wolf Moon, and may many wishes come true for you in the new year.

Recommended websites:

• Predator Conservation Alliance: Saving a Place for America's Predators
  predatorconservation.org
• Wolf Howl: Lupine Defense League
  wolfhowl.org
• Wolf Haven International: sanctuary and public education
  wolfhaven.org
• Predator Friendly: "Green" Wool: article by John Clayton
  gallatin.org/pub/GI.RW96.Clayton4.html