Renee Dutcher and Teo Alfero were married outside a tepee on the eve of a full moon, after being walked down the aisle with two of their rescued wolf-dog hybrids. Their wedding, highlighted in a Vows column on May 31, 2013, was held at Wolf Connection, a nonprofit sanctuary in Acton, Calif., founded by Mr. Alfero in 2009. The sanctuary rescues and rehabilitates wolf-dogs and uses those considered safe in programs to help at-risk youth. The couple then lived on the 28-acre wooded compound in a 30-foot trailer, without plumbing or electrical lines of its own.
At first the big deal for the couple was their age difference.
Mr. Alfero met Ms. Dutcher in 2009 when he strolled into a cafe near his compound with two of his fetching wolf-dogs on leashes. Ms. Dutcher was 17. Mr. Alfero was 37. At the time, Ms. Dutcher was taking classes in exotic animal training and jumped at the chance to work as a volunteer at Wolf Connection.
The romance came later.
The couple married three days after Ms. Dutcher turned 21.
Since their wedding seven years ago, they no longer live in a small trailer without running water but in a spacious stone house on a different and larger wolf-dog compound in Palmdale, Calif. They moved in 2016, soon after the birth of their daughter, whom they named Kaila, a name that is a Native American word for daughter of the moon, Mr. Alfero said. He is the author of “The Wolf Connection: What Wolves Can Teach Us About Being Human,” which was published last year. He has also given a TEDx talk. Moby has visited and so has Woody Harrelson.
The 20-year age difference does not appear to have been an obstacle for the couple.
Mr. Alfero, who is from a wealthy Argentine-Italian family, came to Los Angeles in 1999 to study at Cleargreen, an organization to promote the spiritual and shamanistic teachings of Carlos Castaneda. After Mr. Alfero became a court-appointed advocate for mistreated youth and developed an anti-bullying campaign for schools, he adopted 16 abused wolf-dogs, leased a piece of land, and started Wolf Connection. He also continues to give workshops on self-discovery. Ms. Dutcher, who grew up in Southern California and asked to be home-schooled so she could spend more time with her horse, has a lifelong commitment to all creatures great and small. How does she fit into Mr. Alfero’s shamanistic pursuits? She laughed. “Well, I’ve read some of the books,” she said.
When asked for the key to the durability of their marriage Ms. Dutcher said, “We are a couple together and yet we are very strong individuals on our own.”
She added that she and her husband approach the world differently. “Teo is a visionary and a big thinker,” she said. “He can see 10 years into the future, whereas for me, I’m more detail-oriented. I take it year to year and think in goals and projections.”
Mr. Alfero agreed with her assessment. “She needs to have all the information first, with all the I’s dotted, and I don’t,” he said. “I fly by the seat of my pants.”
Despite these separate outlooks, he said, they rarely argue. “She has a great way of accepting that I just need the bullet points in order to go forward,” he said. “And it doesn’t bother me that she needs a lot more information.”
In the day-to-day running of Wolf Connection, which has grown from one acre to 165 acres and now has 26 employees, 40 volunteers and 32 wolf-dogs, Ms. Dutcher concentrates on rehabilitating and training the rescued wolf-dogs while Mr. Alfero spends most of his time developing projects and working with staff and his board of directors. “I translate the animals to him and he translates the people to me,” Ms. Dutcher said. “If I’m working on a relationship with a new wolf, I can give him guidance and he can give me feedback when I work with people.”
Ms. Dutcher believes that having spent most of her life attentive to the needs of animals prepared her to be a mother. “A newborn baby can’t speak English and can’t communicate her wants,” she said. “My being attuned to what animals need comes to me naturally and that helped me care for this little human being who was 1,000 percent dependent on me.”
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Mr. Alfero added that his intimate knowledge of the wolf-dogs helped him as a father. “Wolves have clear emotional expressions,” he said. “Joy is joy for them and when they get upset, they are unapologetic,” he said. “Emotions are more complicated for humans. They will discipline a child and send him to his room. But this can be followed by guilt and by buying the child a gift so the child forgives you. That is confusing for a child. So what I do, to the best of my ability, is I get upset with my daughter and the correction comes. And then she will come back to me and say, ‘Daddy can we play?’ and I say, ‘Absolutely.’ I don’t say, ‘Remember what you did? I’m still angry.’ That is a lesson I got from the wolves.”
To an outsider, the work of the Wolf Connection and that of Joseph Maldonado-Passage, a.k.a. Joe Exotic, star of the recent Netflix series “Tiger King,” might seem similar. But in Ms. Dutcher’s view, the only thing they have in common is wild animals. “He breeds animals and sells them as pets,” she said. “We rescue animals that come from dire situations, house them for life and give them a different purpose — to help children.”
The wolf-dogs are both a constant presence and a constant reference point for the couple.
Recently, during the Covid-19 lockdown, Ms. Dutcher started to feel fragile. Many employees had been furloughed, several wolf-dogs had died at the beginning of the year, and she wasn’t able to rely on her usual support system. “I was feeling sad and losing my self-confidence,” she said. “Teo was able to say, ‘I see you as this strong fierce woman who is my wife and the mother of our daughter, who cares for this pack of wolves and works beautifully with our team here. That is who I see. And that is who you are.’ He’s similar to the wolves in that he sees you for who you truly are. And he’s my absolute greatest supporter.”
Having to home-school their daughter during the coronavirus pandemic is no problem. “She’s only five and a half,” Ms. Dutcher said. “It’s not like she’d doing algebra!”
Mr. Alfero said that over the past seven years of marriage he has discovered something he had not expected. “I do not enjoy traveling anymore and leaving my family,” he said. “I start to have anxiety in my body. The thought of something happening to them and me not being around keeps me up at night. I have to reassure myself that everything is going to be OK. Every time it is OK and every time, I have the same feeling again. I did not anticipate that.”
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