Catherine Lorde has a job that makes me jealous.

She plays with puppies for a living.

These are wolf puppies.

Catherine set me some audio she recorded during her research, and you can hear one of the

puppies climb into her lap.

She's wagging his tail and wriggling around, and he can't sit still.

At eight weeks old, he's small enough to fit in her lap, but he looks like a wolf, with

a point it's now in sharp ears.

Catherine isn't playing with wolf pups just for fun.

As an evolutionary biologist, she's fascinated by what separates wolves from dogs.

On one hand, they're very closely related.

They share 99.9% of their genetics.

They share an ancestor, and they can even mate and have fertile offspring together.

But they're still very different animals.

She told me you can even see that in a wolf puppy.

They look more like tiny bears than tiny dogs, but they also have a distinctive smell.

They have more of a little bit of a musky smell, which is also very pleasant, but very mildly

skunky is the closest thing that I could pick up in a nice way.

But it's not just the way they look in smell.

Wolves have a wildness in them that never really goes away.

They also still have all of their natural hunting behaviors, which dogs don't have.

So if I, for example, had a sore shoulder, I wouldn't go in with the adult wolves, even

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