Dancing With Wolves

Perhaps you've heard of Shaun Ellis before. For 21 years, the British wolf expert has been living among wolves—howling, licking and snarling as one of them, both in the wild and in captivity, in the name of research. He spent seven years on an Indian reservation near Yellowstone National Park studying their distinctive howls, and ultimately publishing a book on the topic, "The Wolf Talk." Later, he was the subject of a National Geographic television special, which documented his experience of raising a trio of cubs abandoned at birth, teaching them how to howl and hunt, and ultimately integrating them into a local pack.

Today, a wild-haired Ellis lives in a tiny trailer on the edge of the Combe Martin Wildlife & Dinosaur Park in North Devon, England, home to a 20-acre wolf sanctuary where he has set up camp. He spends days at a time with the park's resident wolf pack—his "family," he calls them—and for the past two years, he has been training his fiancée, the blond and blue-eyed Helen Jeffs, to become one of them. This means giving up pastries—Jeffs's favorite—to feast on raw meat, kidneys and intestines; and hoping that playful romping with the wolves doesn't get too rough (Ellis recently suffered a concussion). It also means nights spent outside, growling and biting to earn respect, and a whole lot of broken nails (Jeffs still hasn't stopped getting them done). All along the way, the couple is being filmed as part of a new reality series, "Living With the Wolfman," which premieres this week in the United States, on Animal Planet.

Jeffs, 42, is a combination of average gal and wolf enthusiast: When she met Ellis, 44, she was working in a local nursery school, living in a three-bedroom house and volunteering at the wildlife sanctuary where Ellis is the resident wolf expert. On weekends, she did ordinary things: hanging out with friends, getting her nails done and baking her favorite pound cake—lemon drizzle. But for the first six months of their relationship, Jeffs and Ellis communicated with each other by howling—yes, howling—across a two and a half mile valley, from Jeffs's home to where Ellis was living with his wolves.

The couple knows their behavior sounds crazy, even for a couple in love. "Five years ago, the idea that I'd be infiltrating a wolf pack wouldn't have occurred to me in my wildest dreams," jokes Jeffs over coffee and pastries—a rare treat—during a recent trip to Manhattan. But both she and Ellis are as passionate about wolves as they are about each other (they were preparing Jeffs for integration long before they were approached by the Animal Planet television network) and hope their research will help show people that human and wolf can coexist peacefully. The goal, assuming Jeffs is accepted into the pack, says Ellis, is to live with the wolves virtually 24-7, with Jeffs earning her keep as caretaker to a new group of cubs—with the help of the pack's alpha female, Cheyenne—feeding and teaching them until they can care for themselves. "If you want to speak for the creature, you have to live as one," says Ellis, who is also the coauthor of the 2005 book "Spirit of the Wolf". "Helen and I are not wolves, but we're like interpreters between both worlds. It's a different way of looking at how we can learn from these animals."

Being an interpreter isn't always as easy as it may look on television, and Ellis has many a scar to prove it. His recent concussion happened when one of the "guys," as he calls his furry friends, clamped down on the back of his neck, a playful move among wolves. Another time, Ellis accidentally ate another wolf's food, and before he could swallow, he was body-slammed, his entire face ending up clenched between that wolf's jaws, with the animal applying just enough pressure to get his point across. "That experience is one of thousands," Ellis says.

For most people, the inevitable next question is, why do it? In one episode of the reality series, Jeffs must chew up raw meat and let the cubs nibble it directly from her mouth. She succeeds, but emerges from the session bloodied and shaken, with gashes to her lips and a chunk missing from her tongue. "It can be scary, and accidents do happen," she says. "But these creatures are extremely balanced. As long as you can understand how they communicate, you'll be safe."