Not a happy time

Following Roger's return from the ravages of a riding accident things became quite manic. Roger obviously felt he needed to get the Trust onto an even footing in case anything happened to him so he went at it with a will. In the main I think we understood why, but the people who had most thrust upon them when he was away, tried to keep things manageable. The trouble was that he had the ideas and the powerful personality to take people with him, whether they wanted to go or not. We had gone from 2 wolves to 7 in no time. We had built a new enclosure and we knew that his objective was to breed from the European wolves that he had imported. We couldn't believe that the Europeans would breed. They had been kept in holding cages in Europe waiting for the accommodation to be built here then when they arrived Roger insisted that they learn to go into sheds at night. We tried everything we knew to achieve this and it has to be said that I am not proud of the part I played in some of the attempts.
To give some idea of the extremes gone to, Roger had cables rigged from his bathroom window to the trap doors on the Euro's enclosure and he sat for hours during his convalescence trying to get them to go in for food so that he could trap them. It didn't work! The longest he left them without food was ten days. I had spoken to the vet and been told that this was wrong and so had insisted on feeding them. This was to come back to haunt me later. In the end Kezia Wilder and I managed to get them in one night. The next morning the kennel was a disaster scene. They had tried to eat their way out of the shed and blood from their cut mouths was everywhere. The bucket holder had been ripped off the wall and they were clearly terrified. That was the last time we tried to get them in..