This is what’s left of a Labrador that had a run-in with a pack of wolves. Yes, wolves can be cannibals.
I am not anti-wolf.
I do not want them to become extinct.
But if we want wolves to return, we have to understand that the animal that probably has the most to worry about them is the domestic dog.
The relationship between wolves and dogs is complex.
Some wolves want nothing more than to hook up with dogs. (Like Romeo).
Not all wolf packs are bad about killing dogs. Wolf researcher Douglas Pimlott had a Labrador that he allowed to roam in the forest while he was studying the Algonquin Park packs. The dog actually brought back a pair of wolves when it returned from one its evening rambles.
We have lots of stories of dogs and wolves fraternizing. The dogs of the Plains Indians often hung with wolves that were milling about their camps. And the dogs of Italian shepherds were often wooed away by randy wolf bitches.
But wolves are well-known for killing each other over territory, and because wolves usually don’t waste what they kill, they often eat interlopers.
That’s what can happen when a pack encounters a freely roaming dog in the woods.
The wolves consider it an interloping wolf, and they respond with aggression and then cannibalism.
Wolves are not furry the noble savages that they have been portrayed to be.
They are still wild animals.
They are still a biological entity.
Those of us who want a better future for wolves must portray them as they really are.
Otherwise, we will look like complete idiots when someone loses a dog to them.
Wolves do not live on mice.
And although wolves can consider dogs to be their friends and mates, they can also consider dogs to be interlopers that are better off dead.
The question of wolves will always be complex and controversial.
And the controversy largely stems from how humans present them in their minds.
Some people see wolves as evil incarnate. They want them all dead.
Others see them as the being entirely benevolent figures. If you kill one, it is as if you’ve killed a person from an indigenous population.
The truth is neither of these presentations is an accurate portrayal of the creature.
Ecosystems do need wolves.
And wolves have many features that might make us admire them as a species.
They share many traits with us.
They have tightly-knit families like ours.
They cooperate to bring down large game.
But just like us, they do things that are difficult to justify.
And in the case of wolves, they have the advantage of not having to justify their behavior.
Their behavior has helped them survive in so many different environments.
They have been able to colonize four different continents because of their complex behavior.
It’s just been in the past ten thousand years that wolf behavior has conflicted so dramatically with our desires.
And after ten thousand years of conflict, man nearly pushed to wolf into extinction.
Man created mythologies about what threats wolves actually posed to his person and property,
And even though wolves do kill livestock and occasionally do kill people, these mythologies were quite potent.
It has been only since about the 1960’s that wolves underwent an image reversal.
And in this image reversal that whole new mythologies were created.
In the West, these mythologies saved them.
But in the long term, the mythology probably doesn’t serve the wolves well.
As wolves return, there will be conflicts.
And some of these conflicts will end with scenes like the one depicted above.
Those of us who want wolves to return have to understand these simple facts.
Denying that it can happen is simply being foolish and dogmatic.
And that’s exactly what the anti-wolf extremists are doing.
And they will seize any chance to make the wolf into the demonic avatar once again.
This is the battle of the straw wolves.
Each side has contrived an image of the creature.
Neither is correct.
But each side relies upon destroying the straw wolf that the other has created.
The straw wolf that has been created since the 1960’s is the one that can most easily be destroyed.
All it takes is for someone to lose his dog to a wolf pack for that straw wolf be lit ablaze.
Wolf lovers should not allow this to happen.
We should not be in the business of saving a straw wolf
We should be about saving the real one.
And the real one sometimes does things that are harmful.
We cannot save this straw wolf.
All it takes are the mangle corpses of dogs for that straw wolf to become as fictional as the one from “Little Red Riding Hood.”
The future of the wolf cannot be hitched to this straw wolf’s star.
If it is, the wolf will be the real loser in the long term.
The trouble is how do we talk about wolves honestly and openly without causing lots of conflict between the two camps.
When your feet are on both sides of the fence, those with both feet on either side can much more easily kick you.
I don’t have a good answer for this problem.
Wolves are complex.
People are more so.
Why didn’t they eat the head?
I have no idea.
It seems more like an act of grizzly to me. The wolves may have killed the dog, but eating it to the bones seem like work of bear to me.
Wolves are notorious bone eaters. They aren’t Borophaginae, but they can eat bones just like that.
Wolves do that, even in grizzly-free areas.
All the reports of wolves killing dogs have been just that – about dogs killed by wolves. Or they are about wolves killing other wolves and eating those wolves that are already killed on the snares.
Do you know of any account available on the net of wolves actually killing and then eating dogs?
In Sweden (there´re only 200+ wolves) 30-40 dogs, mostly hunting dogs but not exclusively, are killed by wolves each year. Many of them are eaten or partly eaten.
I guess you can find some statistics and comments by googling: wolves, Sweden.
Problem is the wolves are concentrated in areas with lots of game (and people), so the conflict is obvious.
Second problem is, due to EU regulations they can´t be hunted! And thus are not particular scared of people.
At one time, I couldn’t figure out why so many dogs in Nordic countries are lost to wolves. Then I found out most of the losses were because people leave their dogs tethered overnight instead of keeping them in a kennel-run or taking them inside (like Canadians do). Our biggest problem is the cougar, not the wolf because the cat have a tendency to go into people’s backyard or uncovered kennel-run. In fact, a hunter can go his entire life without ever seeing a wolf despite the high-population density of wolves in the Canadian frontier.
Also, I have always thought that it would be easy to breed with natural aversion for alpha predators since in Russia, their hunting dogs have a fear of big cats and wild canines; then I visited Finland and saw how many villages there were the country-side. There was a house virtually every 5- or 10-kilometre along the road, and every so often, there was a hamlet. Now i understood why so many people see wolves all the time.
It became apparent that the problems that Canadians and Russians have with wolves are very different from North European’s problems with wolves: the sheer number of people living in the country-side will only make it so that humans and wolves are unable to live with each others. At least in the two biggest nations in the planet, there is space for wild animals to be left at peace.
http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/WildlifeHabitat/wolf/dogdeps.html
And: http://books.google.com/books?id=YeiU2OnJKaUC&lpg=PA2&ots=X-2cJFDLXm&dq=wolves%20killing%20dogs%20lopez&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thank you, Scottie.
Wolves often eat dogs, even dogs that have been running with them. They’ll tear their own siblings apart in sibling battles that would be only skirmishes in a litter of dog puppies; at least, a litter of wolf/dog hybrids that I raised from 3 days old did. They decided that one pup (a female) was low man on the totem pole, but at first it was just making her always eat and play last, etc. Then one evening at feeding they violence suddenly erupted and the other 4 pups literally ripped her to shreds within a couple of minutes. The vet couldn’t save her. The astonishing part of this was that they were only 10 weeks old at the time of the incident.
I do not know whether wild wolves have similar “puppy battles”, or whether these being wolf/dog hybrids made a difference.
That can happen in dogs, too – terriers specifically. In “Genetics and Social Behavior of the Dog” breeding experiments were carried out with fox terriers, shelties, cocker spaniels, beagles, and basenjis. The fox terriers had to be separated early, I think 12 weeks, because they tried to kill each other.
Curious, were the pups raised without a parent?
The female (wolf) parent had raised them until they had to be separated from her because she was a smallish animal, and the pups were literally dragging her around all over the kennel. Their sire was a very large blue merle part-rottweiler mongrel who jumped the the fence. The man who owned the female was going to drown the puppies because he had wanted to mate her to a white arctic wolf & he did not want a litter of hybrids. But I asked if I could take them and keep them until they were old enough to place in homes & he reluctantly agreed. It was an experience I never want to repeat, but one I treasure, even though it ended in heartbreak for me.
The pups would behave themselves when on or both of my male GSDs were present, but otherwise, they were like “punks”, just trying themselves to see how much mayhem they could cause, and inflicting really serious bites, bites that showed bone, on each other. They were not aggressive to people, per se, but I never went in with them, after they were about 7 weeks old, unless someone was with me or just outside the kennel. Only because of two things: some – not all – of them had an appraising way of looking at you, as if looking for the moment. And then they literally tore their sister to pieces right in front of me, at such a young age … classic pack behavior, started eating her as they killed her. I would not have thought that pups so young, even wolf pups, could be killing aggressive.
I kept one. She was too wild to safely place in another home. I had her for three, well almost four, years. I loved her. I really loved her. But she was becoming more and more predatory as she matured (people familiar with hybrids had warned me about this, but I hoped that mine was different). I finally made a decision that still hurts to this day: I had her humanely euthanatized. She was my responsibility, and I had to do it. But oh, how it hurt.
It is not unheard of it for a pack of hunting dogs to come across an alone hunting dog and kill it. It is a rarity, but it does happen. It is usually occur when a hunter uses the same hunting-ground over and over again.
You see the same behaviour with dogs who are friends with each others who think the park is theirs, since owners never take them anywhere else other than that specific park, toward strange dogs.
This sometimes happens with packs of sight hounds that have been used to kill coyotes.
Thanks for a great post. It is maddening when people try to boil down animal behavior (or any other aspect of nature, for that matter) to simple-minded ideas.
I love wolves. I love my black Labrador retriever probably more (although I am under no delusion that his single existence is more important than that of a wild species). When I saw your post I was curious to see what it involved – and then I was sorry I was so curious, and quite queasy. I have learned many things since starting to follow your blog, one of those things being that no word (or photo) is minced when you write. Still, I found the text very interesting and your frank honesty is something that I appreciate.
If I may be so bold – maybe a graphic image warning next time?
Well, if wolves are going to have a chance to survive in a world dominated by Homo sapiens, we have to allow populations big enough to secure viable genetic diversity, and hunting to make sure wolves stay afraid of man.
If not the wolf popuations will degenerate and/or conflicts with human interests will make us extirpate them again – this time, maybe for good.
My memory is rubbish, maybe someone else can give the reference. I remember someone (Stoltzenberg?) making a convincing argument that the modern wolf is very different from its ancestral lineage precisely because it has been selected to be afraid of humans.
John Bradshaw in Dog Sense.
Did anyone read about the recent death of a woman zoo keeper in Denmark , attacked and part eaten by a pack of seven wolves as she routinely entered their enclosure, as she had done safely every day before? Attacks are mostly from packs.
I agree and know from experience that terriers cannot altogether be trusted – even the seemingly benign wheaten terrier, from my experience of breeding them in the past. The bull terrier breeds are potentialy quite dangerous as everyone knows, of course.
[…] Wolves are still predators, and although they don’t often attack people, they certainly can do a lot of damage to a dog. […]
While I love dogs a great deal, being a lazy dog owner isn’t the wolves fault, but the fault of the dog owner. Wolves DO eat other canids, far more than livestock as you point out. The immense loss of wolves the major reason that coyotes are over-running everything, plus it is critically impairing herd resistance to prion disease, since Coyotes are not good at weeding out the weak members. Prion disease has become epidemic due to the critical lack of wolves. We desperately need wolf populations to be restored.