Wolf - The unrecognized companion
For millennia no other animal challenged man's fantasy as much as the Wolf. The Wolf (Canis lupus) served as the perfect example for evil in fairytales and fables. Nowadays Wolves are often transfigured as noble animals. What is the origin of this special attitude of man to Wolves? Since Wolves are at the top of the food chain, the paths of humans and Wolves crossed again and again. At times when humans were still leading their lives as hunters and collectors, Wolves were among their major competitors for food. When they settled down and started raising cattle, it was again the Wolf which threatened their herds; the cattle was easy to hunt since it lost its natural escape behaviour. From the Wolves' point of view it made sense to search for nearness to the herds and thus to humans. But Wolves have never been a direct danger to humans. There are hardly any serious reports of free living Wolves attacking humans.
About 10.000 years ago, when man started settling down and raising cattle, another development started: The domestication of the Wolf, which is recognized as the ancestor of all domestic dog breeds nowadays. Possibly it started that way: Some Wolves have been less timid than others and instead of searching for nearness to the herds they entered the human settlements to search for food among the scraps of meat, a behaviour that is still shown by Wolves in certain areas nowadays. These Wolves became more and more used to humans and humans learned to profit from the social behaviour of Wolves, which is crucial to the close relationship between dog and man. Thus the Wolf became the oldest domestic animal following Sheep and Goat.
Originally the Wolf had a vast distribution range. But, caused by human persecution, Wolves vanished from a lot of areas they inhabited in former times. Wolves had been distributed holarctic, i.e. on the entire northern hemisphere. Because of this large distribution range, consisting of several climate and vegetation zones, a wide variability occured during the Wolf's evolution; not less than 40 subspecies are known nowadays. The subspecies partly differ widely in size and colour. While the Arabian subspecies weighs just 15 kg, North American Wolves reach weights up to 80 kg, for example. Accordingly the Wolves' variability concerning their behaviour and their social organization is very wide too. Generally Wolves live in small packs consisting of five to eight members. But the size of a pack is influenced by several parameters, especially by the way the animals get their food. In areas where Wolves live in close neighbourhood to humans and feed on scraps of meat, they appear single or in very small groups. Thus they are less conspicious and avoid being detected by humans. In areas not touched by civilization, where Wolves are specialized on hunting large prey, the packs are of larger size, consisting sometimes of up to 20 members. Under such conditions a well coordinated cooperation between the members is recommended. In contrary to Great cats, which are perfect hunters because of their anatomy and are able to hunt solitary, Wolves are dependent on cooperation. Young Wolves stay longer with such hunting packs than with packs living by human waste, because they have to learn how to hunt efficiently.
The social organization of Wolves is characterized by a strict gender specific hierarchy. The males as well as the females have their own hierarchy. At the top there are the so-called alpha-animals, the alpha-wolf and the alpha-she-wolf. In most cases just these two animals reproduce, but the other members of the pack help raising the pups. If one or both of the parents are killed, survival of the litter is still possible, especially, if the pups are not that young anymore. The hierarchy between the males is not as stable as the hierarchy between the females. It is tested again and again by playful quarrels. If the alpha-wolf is showing signs of weakness, the quarrels will get serious, which might end in the removal of the old alpha-wolf, who has to leave the pack in order to not getting killed. The alpha-she-wolf mostly remains in her position for a longer time. She is the one, who dominates the pack in the long term.
Since Wolves are protected by law in Middle and Western Europe, the small populations are able to stabilize. Sometimes it's reported that Wolves come back to areas, where they have been driven out in former times. Nowadays there are some Wolves, coming from Eastern Europe, living again in the Eastern parts of Germany. The question if the Wolf is able to be a "normal part" of our fauna again is strongly dependent on the tolerance of the humans inhabiting those areas. Fortunately more and more don't look at the Wolf as the dangerous fairytale-beast anymore.
This article was originally published at magazine.naturspot.de. Link to the original article
Picture of grey wolf is a work of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
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