Programming Instinct

When is an animal out in the forest not
in its natural element? When it has been
selected for domestication away from the
habitat it was born to, in service to another
species that broke from the landscape where
nature nurtured it to rely on its own initiatives
exploiting nature beyond what might ever
have been imagined possible. Breeding
instills in animals impulses and attitudes that
cannot be denied much less over-ridden
through instruction and exposure, threat or 
punishment for what becomes written into
the indelible code of existence supporting
survival burns with an intensity not readily
dislodged by any means of coercion. So it is
when accompanying a domesticated animal
whose inbred compulsion to pursue the fleeting
form of another beast that it cannot be recalled
until the ritual hunt-and-kill formula has seen
response and is satisfied. Two noble beasts,
one designed by nature to run free in the
forest, denning up and preying on smaller
denizens, and the other bred to hunt on the
instruction of humankind, domesticated yet
nurturing the wild impulse within, an urban-
wild drama of fox and Malamute, a sorrow.