While hiking yesterday afternoon in Runyon Canyon a friend and I ran into Willow the wolf, a nearly-four-year-old female, and her owner Ted Shred. Willow is a big girl — she’d be taller than me if she stood on her hind legs — but she’s gone to behavior school and was interacting gently with other dogs.

I asked Shred, an actor-stuntman, if Willow had been approached or interviewed about “acting” in Joe Carnahan‘s The Grey, and he said “naah, the wolves were all CGI in that film” plus it shamelessly lied, he said, by pushing a bullshit myth about wolves being snarly monsters who couldn’t wait to slaughter Liam Neeson and his pallies.

At that moment I was reminded what bugged me about The Grey all along apart from the nothing ending (“Whoa, I’m about to die…adrenalin!”). It is mostly if not all-but-totally full of shit about wolf behavior. In a 2.3.12 National Geographic interview, wildlife ecology prof Daniel MacNulty says that “most people don’t realize this [that] wolves are wimps.”

Willow has big paws and friendly eyes and beautiful white and light gray fur. Here’s her Facebook page.

Why is the word “gray” spelled with an “e” as well as an “a”? What’s the point of that?