Hunger
Notes from the Cage
My father is not angry.
I know this because he says so, sitting across from me in a booth at Silver Diner, visibly agitated, voice low and sharp. He’s recounting an exchange with a man I know to be difficult, even infuriating. His eyes dart everywhere but my face. His body shifts forward and back in the seat.
When the story ends, I shake my head. “I can’t believe he did all that. I’d be angry too.”
“I’m not angry,” my father growls, his eyes at full burn.
Have you heard the famous Cherokee story about a boy overcome with anger? His grandfather tells him: “There are two wolves inside you—one dark, one light. They’re fighting. Which one wins? The one you feed.”
It’s a tidy story. I’m not sure I like it.
There’s a longer version. In it, the grandfather continues:
“If you choose to only feed the light wolf, the dark one will be hiding around every corner, waiting for you to become distracted or weak so he can jump in and get what he craves. He will always be angry, always fight the light wolf. But if you acknowledge him, he is happy, the light wolf is happy, and everyone wins. The dark wolf has tenacity, courage, strategic thinking. The light wolf has compassion and discernment. Feed both and there’s no more internal battle. Starve one and it becomes uncontrollable.”
Which version is more ‘authentic,’ more ‘true’? Who gets to say?
I found this longer version on a blog. The comments are as juicy as the post.
A Cherokee woman writes: “If the most evil things hide in the darkness, then the light must be the scariest place on earth. It is the will to choose and the wisdom of knowing how to use what is inside you that allows you to maintain a balance.”
Another commenter named Sophie argues that this longer version is “fake and distorted,” perpetuating harm to indigenous peoples by making their wisdom consumable for white psychology.
Aaron, who identifies as Native American, disagrees: “The one commonly shared on the internet that is shortened is the harmful one because it encourages repressing one side of yourself rather than confront it.”
At 35, I am trying to learn the wisdom of knowing how to use what is inside me. Repressing my dark sides has not served me well.
It is slow, disorienting work. Sometimes I get tired—as tired as I was before, working overtime to perform sanity and obedience. Sometimes, when I try to explain the essence of my problematic existence, the thorn in my flesh, I find myself saying:
It’s like I’m a wolf tired of pretending I’m a dog.
True as it feels, it’s an embarrassing thing to say out loud. I don’t have the right to identify with wolves. The last time I encountered one was at the zoo, through thick glass smudged by handprints. He was reclining on a rock. Was he happily digesting a meal or quietly despairing of life itself? I have no idea. I’m just some lady who paid to gawk at wild animals from a safe distance. I don’t know them; I know nothing about them.
But I am hungry. For what? Something to sink my teeth into. The chase. Wide open spaces and easy knowledge of how to howl and run and dig and hunt—not at the command of some human master but of whatever you call the source of life, the eternal spark that made me what I am and without which I am nothing.
And I am tired. Of kibble. Of retractable leashes. Of shitting in public and pretending I don’t want to rip out certain throats when the walls close in.
One of those throats belongs to Abraham Maslow. Or, more precisely, his brainchild.
Maslow is famous for Maslow’s pyramid (which wasn’t his idea), based on Maslow’s hierarchy (which very much was). Maslow was fascinated by human nature. He wanted to explain what drives us, all of us, to do what we do. What are we seeking? What are we hungry for?
You know the answer. You need to meet your immediate physiological needs—food, water, shelter, air—before thinking seriously about safety. Once you’re full and safe, you can start to look for love and belonging.
If you’re lucky (or skilled) enough to get all that—stable employment, a house in one of the good neighborhoods, a strong circle of supportive family and friends—then you can start to think about personal growth: esteem, self-actualization, maybe even transcendence.
I’ve heard that hearing a lie just two or three times makes it feel more true. Hearing it seven times lodges it into your long-term memory. This happens with statements we know to be false, but the effect is even greater when we don’t know what to believe, or when we aren’t paying close attention.
How many times have you encountered some version of Maslow’s hierarchy? For me, the answer is in the hundreds, maybe thousands.
When I was seven, I drew my sister with red horns. My mother had suggested illustrating my “big feelings”—she’d read about it somewhere. I was trying not to bite the little button-pushing monster again, and the overwhelming urge needed somewhere to go that wasn’t her arm.
The drawing worked. I felt better. I promptly forgot the whole thing happened.
Eleven years later, my mother pulled that drawing from the filing cabinet where she keeps receipts. “Can you believe you were ever this mean?”
In that moment, I understood something. The drawing wasn’t meant to help me; it was meant to keep me in check.
And it worked. I never needed to be told that my anger was ugly and unacceptable, dangerous and unruly, a sign that there was something deeply wrong with me. I had been telling myself that since before I could remember.
Maslow’s hierarchy isn’t ugly. It’s elegant. Intuitive. And completely unfounded.
Maslow never provided empirical evidence. Decades of research tried to validate his hierarchy, but no one could. Not in longitudinal data. Not across cultures. Not anywhere.
The hierarchy was more hypothesis than theory. It could have been an interesting starting point for real inquiry. But instead of starting fruitful conversations, it shut them down. The question of what drives us had found its answer. The idea multiplied, unchecked, spreading like an invasive species through the landscape of our collective imagination.
How did one man’s baseless theory become natural law in boardrooms, classrooms and parenting books? There’s nothing natural about it. It smells like a chemical reproduction of a forest, like a tree-shaped air freshener infusing the car of a chain smoker.
I want to hunt it down, pull up its roots, toss it in the incinerator. When the smoke clears, maybe we can start to smell real pine.
There’s a proverb in the Hebrew Bible that says, “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.”
Maslow’s story isn’t new. Whatever makes us swallow half-truths down whole happens over and over. We see what we want to see. We eat what we want to eat, even if it comes from our own stomachs, even if it makes us sick.
In the same decade that Maslow published “A Theory of Human Motivation,” an animal behaviorist named Rudolph Schenkel published a study on wolf behavior. Schenkel didn’t have a fun visual aid or catchy phrase to help popularize his work—that would come later.
What he did have was data, lots and lots of data.
Schenkel had performed an unprecedented feat: he had studied a creature of mythological stature, rigorously, up close, with his own eyes. He had spent 13 years at Basel Zoo, watching, taking notes. His paper was the first scientific study of wolves ever published.
What Schenkel found was powerful and fascinating: the social order of an apex predator. He was the first to show that wolf packs are a hierarchy, ruled by a male and female pair that maintained their authority through aggression and dominance.
How many times have you heard the term “alpha”? How true does it seem that the strongest will lead? How natural does fighting your way to the top feel?
When I was thirteen, I was told I should remove my canine teeth.
“They won’t come down properly,” the orthodontist explained. They hung high in my gums, as if afraid to descend. If I wanted to fix the overcrowding and prevent future complications, I needed surgery.
“What kinds of complications?” I asked. He shrugged.
I had a week to think about it. Feeling stuck between a rock (getting called “sharkface”) and a hard place (getting my face bones ripped out), I decided to ask for advice.
When I asked my crush, I was secretly hoping he’d say, You look beautiful no matter what. He shrugged.
When I asked my mom, she told me a story about her own childhood dentist, who had removed several of her brother’s teeth for no reason. “He might have been a sadist,” she mused.
A wolf would have kept her teeth. Wolves know what they want and how to get it. They chase prey at speeds up to 38 miles per hour, biting the shoulders and flanks of animals much bigger than they are repeatedly, until they’re too weak to fight back. Their bite force can snap bones in half.
I chose the path of least resistance. I got the surgery. The braces. The retainer I didn’t realize until it was being handed to me that I was supposed to wear at night, every night, for the rest of my life.
As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.
In 1970, a biologist accomplished a feat comparable to Maslow’s theory and Schenkel’s study: he published a bestseller. He turned the subject of wolf behavior into everyday small talk.
L. David Mech had the gift of making science interesting and relevant. The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species summarized decades of wolf research—including Schenkel’s and his own. Mech wrote that “every mature wolf has… a tendency to widen, not his personal territory, but rather, his own social behaviour freedom.” Wolves had an innate need to assert their dominance and expel aggressive energy by fighting weaker members of the pack. In other words, there were “alpha wolves” and “beta wolves” (terms he coined), locked together in dominance hierarchies maintained by constant fighting.
“It turned out all that stuff was mostly wrong,” Mech explained in an interview with the New Yorker. Mech has been correcting his own work publicly since 1999. After years of fighting his publisher, he finally convinced them to stop printing The Wolf in 2022.
Why?
For decades, scientists like Mech had overlooked an important detail: Schenkel’s wolves were not free.
In the wild, a wolf runs about 30 miles a day, hunting within their pack’s territory of up to 1,000 square miles. Schenkel’s wolves were packed into a cage the size of a basketball court.
In the wild, a wolf pack is a family, led by a mother and father. They only fight to protect their territory from encroaching neighbors.
Schenkel’s wolves were packed into a cage with ten strangers—a cage that was itself surrounded by members of strangers from another species, gawking at them from a safe distance.
Schenkel’s wolves had plenty of food, but they were starving.
When I was fifteen, my father grabbed me by the arm, hard, eyes blank, and asked, “Why don’t you love me?”
We were standing waist-deep in the ocean. He was drunk.
In that moment, I understood something. My father wasn’t talking to me. He couldn’t see me. My love, my fear, my anger—none of it was real to him. It didn’t matter what I said, what I felt, what I did. Every interaction was being filtered through thick stained glass, playing the same story over and over. It was a story that had little, if anything, to do with me, a story too old and deep and wide for one hopeful heart to change.
I said nothing. He let go.
After my son was born, my father would ask me to open up to him, to trust him with my deepest thoughts. My gut told me not to, but I did it anyway. I told him things I’d been afraid to say my whole life.
He cut down every detail that didn’t align with his self-image.
In our last email exchange, he wrote: “I’ll always be there for you.”
I replied: “You’ve never been there for me.”
We don’t talk anymore.
When we swallowed the wrong story about wolves—the wrong story about power, about our own needs, about what it means to be wild—what were we hungry for?
As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.
Wolves don’t eat their own vomit. Wolves are careful; they don’t even eat the stomach contents of their prey. They do, however, feed their young the way birds do: by vomiting partially digested food for pups too young to leave the den.
Adult dogs enact a twisted version of their heritage, living out an experience of wolf pups in the wild in the context of their current reality: getting food from human masters. It’s as if they miss being fed by their parents so much they feed themselves however they can.
Schenkel looked for wolf nature and found dominance hierarchies. Abraham Maslow looked for dominance hierarchies and found human nature.
Five years before he published “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Abraham Maslow was interested in a very different aspect of the human experience: how we organize society. He hypothesized that all cultures form social hierarchies maintained by the dominance of a few over the rest. He spent six weeks among the Blackfoot (Siksika) Nation in Alberta, Canada, to test his hypothesis.
He was proven very wrong.
At Siksika, Maslow saw people living out the wildest dreams of his contemporaries: lives of peace, cooperation, respect, and deep satisfaction. Parents enjoyed their children; children helped their parents, freely and willingly. Family, friends, and neighbors worked and played together. Poverty—both the physical and psychological kind—was hard to find.
Siksika was “a place where what he would later call self-actualization was the norm.” Maslow estimated that “80–90% of the Blackfoot tribe had a quality of self-esteem that was only found in 5–10% of his own population.”
Maslow was so struck by the contrast between the Blackfoot people and the European-Americans living nearby that he wrote, “the more I got to know the whites in the village, who were the worst bunch of creeps and bastards I’d ever run across in my life, the more it got paradoxical.”
Maslow experienced a society built on cooperation rather than dominance, restorative justice rather than punishment, egalitarianism rather than elitism, and generosity rather than greed. This encounter changed the trajectory of his research. He started to believe that humans were fundamentally good; bad behavior was just a sign of unmet needs.
So what happened? How did Maslow’s firsthand experience with medicine that could heal a sick culture become just another ingredient of the same old regurgitated half-truths?
Maybe, as Blackfoot scholar Billy Wadsworth (of the Blood, or Kanai Tribe) suggests, Maslow did not “fully situate the individual within the context of community.”
Or maybe, as Blackfoot scholar Ryan Heavy Head says, “the one thing that [Maslow] really missed was the Indigenous relationship to place. Without that, what he’s looking at as self-actualization doesn’t actually happen.”
I don’t like the term individualistic. It sounds like a personality trait or a moral choice. Individualism is neither. It’s more like the lens of an observer than the belief system of the observed. It’s a way of seeing an individual outside their context—letting everything around them blur and recede, like portrait mode—and then making judgments and assumptions about their nature, as if the context didn’t birth the individual, as if the individual could possibly exist outside it.
Schenkel’s wolves weren’t individualistic.
What choices are really available to you when your ‘community’ is an assortment of traumatized strangers? When your ‘place’ is a cage at the zoo? What hope is there you will ever be full?
I am no longer surprised when someone gets hungry enough to bite. I am no longer surprised by the blood on my tongue.
As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.
Whatever makes us swallow half-truths down whole happens over and over. We see what we want to see. We eat what we want to eat, even if it comes from our own stomachs, even if it makes us sick.
L. David Mech, the man who popularized the “alpha wolf” concept, did study wild wolves. For decades. How did he not correct Schenkel’s findings?
Maybe because he watched them from a distance—mostly by helicopter. Until the 1990s, he had encountered a wild wolf within 15 feet exactly once.
Schenkel observed wolves in a zoo. Mech watched wolves from the sky. Maslow visited the Blackfoot Nation for six weeks.
What can you really know about nature from a distance? You have to get your paws muddy.
I’m starting to find out.
The problem with leaving the zoo is that you leave it alone, unskilled for the work of living naturally. You have to unlearn everything you know—the glass, food tossed over the wall, the constant turmoil in your stomach and your society—and relearn how to survive by new rules.
In popular imagination, the lone wolf is romantic: fiercely independent, needing no one, having voluntarily rejected the pack.
But real lone wolves are usually young wolves, a year or two old, who’ve decided to find a mate and start their own pack. They’re not rejecting connection; they’re seeking it. And the journey is dangerous. Lone wolves are vulnerable to starvation, injury, death. They’re not stronger for being alone. They’re surviving until they can build community again.
Some never make it. They die hungry and alone.
I’m one of the lucky ones. I found another lone wolf, equally hungry, equally willing to risk everything for the chance to be both wild and connected. We’re building something new: a small pack, just the two of us and our pup, learning to howl and play and hunt, finding the edges of our territory.
Or so I like to think. I’d like to say I left the cage: the family I was born into, jobs that come with a collar, relationships that require me to remove my teeth to be loved.
But the cage is everywhere. For every leash I break, I find another lodged inside my brain. Maybe civilization is the zoo. Maybe there’s no way out. Maybe I’d die outside it.
I look back at my father, vibrating across from me in Silver Diner with an anger he can’t own, and I see a wolf starving from a hunger he can’t name, snapping at the other wolves in his cage. I see a collar, his name engraved on a golden tag.
I want to grab him by the neck and make him look me in the eye. I want to say, Don’t you understand? We aren’t bad dogs. We’re motherfucking wolves.
Sources
Mech, L. David. “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs.” 1999. https://wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/267alphastatus_english.pdf
Mech, L. David. “The Myth of the Alpha Wolf.” The New Yorker, April 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-myth-of-the-alpha-wolf
Poell, Nicole. “Which Wolf Will You Feed?” Blog post, July 2018. https://www.drnicolepoell.com/blog/2018/7/10/blog-headline-376gb-tm28t
Prentis, Steve. “I Got It Wrong.” Medium, 2022. https://gatherfor.medium.com/i-got-it-wrong-7d9b314fadff
Schenkel, Rudolph. “Expression Studies on Wolves.” 1947. https://davemech.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ExpressionstudiesP.1-10.pdf
Tetreau, Darcia. “Blackfoot Wisdom That Inspired Maslow Could Guide Us Now.” Mad in America, December 2022. https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/12/blackfoot-wisdom-inspired-maslow-guide-us-now/
Maslow, A.H. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review, 1943. https://www.academia.edu/7657195/A_THEORY_OF_HUMAN_MOTIVATION
This article comes at the perfect time. Your insight on the two wolves, especially the second version, is so briliant. What if we applied this 'feed both' approach to all our difficult feelings? A true paradigm shift.
First, that was a gut-punch of an ending, you love your father a ton, and I wish both of you the best !
Second, to quote Miguel and Tulio "Both, both is good"