PASADENA, Calif. — Move over, Lon Chaney Jr., there's a new Wolf Man in town. And this one doesn't just howl at the moon.

This one cuddles, licks, snarls and growls just like the real thing. Shaun Ellis is the unorthodox animal researcher who lived with a pack of wolves for 18 months and lived to tell the tale.

Well, actually National Geographic Channel is telling the tale in "A Man Among Wolves," a documentary chronicling Ellis' run with the pack.

Ellis has been interested in animals ever since he was a kid. "I was no different from other children," he says seated at a round table in a bar-lounge at a hotel here.

"We were brought up with a fear of wolves through stories and rhyme and 'Red Riding Hood.' They were bad, aggressive, demonic, if you like. But there is another side to them: a close family bond and a commitment to each other to survive. I think that's what intrigued me. We could see so much of our own lifestyle and upbringing or how we should've been brought up in these animals and that to me was the challenge to see what we had to teach."

As a boy, he wangled a job as a gamekeeper in his native England, but lost it as soon as the landowner discovered Ellis feeding the game he was supposed to be protecting to the foxes.

His fascination with foxes led to his interest in wolves. Since there are no wild wolves in England, he traveled west to indulge his passion for the canines.

"I was working with wolves at that time, traveling to Idaho, Canada, did a lot of work throughout Europe. It was through that we started to gain orphan wolves who couldn't be raised in a captive environment by keepers because their schedules were so busy or animals that were injured. A lot of our wolves came from rescuing," he says, his dishwater blond hair pulled tight in a ponytail.

When cubs were abandoned by their mother, Ellis seized the day. "We were going to provide one of the females as a nanny. Unfortunately what we didn't plan on was her abandoning the pups. That's what happened, so it changed the criteria completely where we were going to live and raise the pups as hers. We had to remove the pups and stop them from being killed or dying."

That was when Ellis became the den mother, moving in with the pups. His devotion to the pack may have cost him his long-term relationship with the mother of his four children, though he claims that happened "for reasons beyond the wolf pack."

Today he's flanked by girlfriend Helen Jeffs, who supports Ellis in his preoccupation with the mammals. "These guys obviously put a tremendous strain on a relationship and loved ones, but you have to have an understanding," he says. "And I guess she's the true hero of everything, because she has to hold it all together while I'm getting down and dirty ... with the wolves."

Though initially Ellis hoped to be able to release these captive wolves back into the wild, that was not possible. "Because of their socialization. They set the blueprint for us to be able to use that to release future generations of wolves into the world," he says.

"Observation took us so far, but interaction with them gave us a little bit more, gave us some of the darker secrets of these wolves that had to be discovered in order to help them."