THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

For over a decade during the late 18th century, a wolf stalked the estate of the Earl of Pembroke in Wilton, Wiltshire. Wolves were not commonly seen roaming the grounds of England's stately homes, though the nobility and gentry enjoyed keeping menageries of exotic creatures when they could. Having been extinct in Britain for centuries (if not millennia), the wolf was certainly an unusual creature. This particular wolf, however, was not wild, nor part of a menagerie; her name was Lupa and she seems to have been thought of as more of a pet.

Lupa was born in 1770 and, once weaned, was given to the Earl of Pembroke. She had her own keeper, Nathaniel Townsend, who was paid between £1 and £2 every few months for 'the keeping of the wolf-bitch'. Lupa was kept separately from the other hounds, perhaps in case of aggression between them, and it is unlikely that she lived in the house. She reportedly had four litters of puppies, one of which is recorded in the household accounts in 1773. At the time of her death, Lupa was 12 years old and like many of the family's pets was buried in the gardens of Wilton House with a headstone. All evidence we have for Lupa's existence refers to her as either a wolf or wolf-bitch, but the epitaph that was inscribed on her headstone makes it clear what Lupa really was: a wolf-dog hybrid. [...]

General interest in creating a typology of animals was driven by the divide between nature and culture that emerged in the Enlightenment during the late-17th and 18th centuries. Nature was something to be studied, observed, dissected and understood. It was only 12 years before Lupa was born that the Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus' most important work had appeared, the 10th edition of Systema Naturae. In it, Linnaeus laid out the classification of the animal kingdom, giving the world a system for naming plants and animals by genus and species. But while this laid the foundation of the taxonomic system of understanding the natural world that we still use today, general attitudes towards animals were very different.

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