This is exactly what you'd want to have pull you out of the snow. Photo via Flickr User USFWS Mountain-Prairie
There are many things I imagine wolverines would be pretty good at if given the opportunity: clawing through a steel fence, fighting crime, or maybe convincing Paul Ryan to seek the Republican nomination, as one pundit recently suggested. But I hadn't considered they might also be useful in a mountain search and rescue situation, because, like most people, I assumed wolverines are reclusive jerks that hate people.
As the largest member of the weasel family, equipped with the jaw pressure of a grizzly bear and a territory-marking odor that earns them the nickname "skunk bear," they've got a tendency to leap at any soft neck tissue they see. They're badass, no question, but low on most people's list of ideal life-savers.
If anyone's going to change minds on this, it's Mike Miller and Steve Kroschel, two dudes in Alaska who really, really love wolverines. The pair have teamed up on a one-of-a-kind pilot project that, fingers crossed, could be using the small but mighty beasts' super powers of scent to save lost skiers caught in avalanches by winter 2017.
"If nobody ever tried, I don't see the harm in trying," says Miller, who is founder of Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, a backcountry reserve that houses orphan animals. "We're doing it because we think it's possible. And if it works, it will be valuable."
It turns out wolverines happen to be naturally adept at finding buried meat bags after an avalanche. Rather than going through all the work of killing small game like rabbit and geese, they see the sides of mountains as giant freezers full of bigger scores like moose and sheep. They can smell deep below the surface of the snow, scale any terrain, and dig like motherfuckers, too.
Kroschel is a wildlife photographer that has already spent 36 years training wolverines in captivity. He says the secret to scaling back wolverines' blood-thirsty nature is to make sure they see humans when they're first born. "Then they become imprinted," he explains. "If you do that with a wolverine, it has an amazing effect. They trust you, they respond to you, they become loyal, they basically demonstrate their real character."
But even with careful training, Kroschel says the current plan won't allow a wolverine to actually dig for a rescue. He adds his own trained wolverines can still act pretty scrappy. "They bite me on the neck, they drag me around," he tells me. "They know just how hard to bite without killing me."
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