“There are many stories about animals as teachers, even from sources who are relatively down-to-earth. A number of these present a similar and unexpected report of a demonstration behavior.

There is one about a man who had an interest in soccer and become bonded with a wolf. The animal rapidly realized the nature of blocking and dodging in agility play with the man, and began to teach the man new moves.

As I recall this story, the process was painstaking, as the man had to work extremely hard to master even a small repertoire. Eventually, the man mastered learned the first tier. The wolf immediately presented a more advanced tier, that was more sophisticated, and took longer to master.

After a few iterations of this, the man realized something inconceivable: the wolf was not presenting the tiers of movement tactics from memory or a catalog. It was improvising them. In this astonishing way, it had an ‘infinite repertoire’.

For the wolf, agility competitions of this nature were, apparently, a kind of ‘metalanguage’ in which complexly relational ‘statements’ could be endlessly assembled from something like rudiments. Or, perhaps more accurately, improvised according to methods that strongly resist or are inaccessible to verbal representation.

A similar demonstration comes to mind between a researcher and a dolphin, who, upon realizing that it was being rewarding for ‘inventing’ a new move, suddenly displayed that it could invent such moves all day long, much to the shock of the researcher.”

— an anonymous informant