Monts de Gueret Animal Park

The Monts de Gueret Animal Park—The Wolves of Chabrières (French: Parc animalier des monts de Guéret—Les Loups de Chabrières) is a 13 hectares (32 acres) public animal park^[2] located close to Guéret in the commune and the prefecture of the Creuse department, Limousin, central France.^[3]

The park regularly receives biology and animal psychology students who do field studies of the animals. The students come from universities in Paris, Marseille, Limoges, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Rennes, Tours, Liège and also from the National veterinary school of Alfort.^[4]

The park supports organizations, such as FERUS and Loup.org, in protecting the wolves of Europe.^[4][5]

International Wolf Center also established several progammes, helping to protect wolves.^[6]

History

The Monts de Gueret Animal Park was created following a public initiative in 2001 and belongs to the Grand Gueret urban community.^[7] The park is located in the central part of Chabrières forest, a few miles from the town of Gueret in the department of Creuse, France.^[1]

The observatory in the park

The park complex is built of wood in the style of a Gallic village; some rocks located within the park territory are decorated with wolves images in an ancient Celtic style, reflecting myths and legends of the past, where wolves are presented as beings, strongly connected to the world of the stars, planets and constellations. The observatory^[8] built inside the Park Circle also emphasizes this idea.

European grey wolves historically populated the forests of Creuse, but the last one died in 1937.^[9][10] Now wolves inhabit the Chabrières forest again: 23 European grey wolves live in semi-freedom inside two forested enclosures with the combined area of 11,000 m² (120,000 sq ft). During the last years, the park extended the variety of the wolves types, and smaller packs of ice white Mackenzie wolves,^[11] black Mackenzie wolves and white arctic wolves have been added to the, dominant by numbers, population of the European grey wolves.^[2]

2015 marked a new era for the animal park: new wolf packs of the different types started to arrive, as well as new species of different animals, which will join the deers, roe deers, wild boars, badgers and foxes, already living there.^[12][13]

Since it was opened in 2001 and up to the summer of 2015, the park has been visited by over half a million visitors.^[2] In 2014, the number of visitors was 42,000,^[1] and it is estimated that the number will increase by 15% for 2015.^[14]

In 2013, one of the male grey wolves managed to escape from the park through a fence that had been cut open.^[15]

Wolves

Image of a wolf in ancient Celtic style

European grey wolves, ice white Mackenzie wolves, black Mackenzie wolves and white arctic wolves, are all living separately in the different parts of the park and can not interact physically.

The wolves' habitat in the park is desiged to let the predators' wild lifestyle be as close to natural as possible,^[16] but only the pack of European grey wolves have the privilege to live and hunt within the two areas of forested land with their lake.^[17]

In 2013, two white arctic wolf cubs were born for the first time in the park.^[18]

During the daily feeding in Chabrières Park, the European grey wolves fight for relatively small peaces of meat, which employees of the wolf park throw from the public observation deck^[19] as a spectacle for viewers and a welcome snack for the wolves. The real hunt, cruel but natural for predators, begins when the audience leaves and the pack hunts for prey under the leadership of the alpha wolf, the male or female with the highest rank in the pack.^[20]

The documentary film Lobo, wolf of Chabrières,^[21] created at the request of the wolf park, tells the story of the cub (as a rule, in the wild only the highest rank pair, the alpha wolves, can produce pups) Lobo's life. Born in Chabrières and growing up in his pack of European grey wolves, which live according to the natural laws of their community, displays the different behaviors of each individual wolf, and complex relationships based on their status in the pack. The ten-minute-long film presents Lobo's life from birth and adolescence, full of games of learning, to the time when he, vigorous and merited by his ingenuity, strength and courage during the hunts, becomes the alpha wolf.

Museum

Inside the museum

A museum in the Chabrières park is the House of the Wolf. It is 250 m² (2,700 sq ft) and exhibits a wealth of information about wolves; from the tales, myths and legends, to scientific materials, related to all aspects of the wolves' life and the human/wolf relationships.^[22] The history of destruction of wolves' habitats and the recent positive changes, leading to the movement of protection of the wolves around the world, institutionalized by an international agreement which took place in Washington and Bern, are also highlighted in the museum exposition.^[23] The latest works of scientists, studying wolves' physiology and psychology, including vocal behaviors, are also well represented in the museum.

Wolves' songs

The Wolves of Chabrières park organizes field studies of wolves' vocal behavior,^[24] where college students and public can listen the songs of wolves during night walks in the forest. Vocal communication is the one of many ways, which wolves use to indicate their mood and intentions, and consists of barks, whines, growls and howls, which can be solo, or chorus where two or more wolves are involved.^[25]

The wolf pack howls on average for 85 seconds. It is usually started by a single wolf, and after that other wolves can join in. The leader of the pack, the alpha wolf, usually uses a lower-pitched howl and howls more frequently than wolves standing on the lower rungs of the social ladder of the pack.^[26] Although some functions of the howling are still considered unknown by scientists; they believe that wolves may howl to scare off other wolves packs from their territory and to assemble their own pack, as wolves possess perfect hearing and their howling can be heard for up to 6 mi (9.7 km) in the forest and 10 mi (16 km) in open space. Researchers have found a relationship between the number of times a wolf howls and the strength of their relationship with other pack members. Friederike Range, co-director of the University of Vienna's Wolf Science Center, said that "the strength of the relationship between wolves predicted how many times a wolf howled."^[27]

Wolf park map.
Dark blue line – Main road
Yellow line – Footpath
Big white Circle – Centre of departure, from where public starts a tour of the Animal Park.
I – Ice White Wolves Mackenzie space.
II – European Grey Wolves space.
III – European Grey Wolves space.
IХ - Black wolves Makenzie space.
Х - Arctic white wolves space.
Blue ball – Boars space.
Green ball – Foxes space.
Orange ball – Badgers space.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Animal Park of the Monts de Gueret.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wolves.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wolf habitats.

• FERUS
• Loup.org