Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
have been more or less provoked and involved mitigating circumstances. For instance, a wolf knocked
down a hunter who was wearing camouflage and had covered himself with liberal applications of deer
scent; when the wolf discovered its mistake, it promptly fled, probably more terrified than the hunter!
Wolves also enjoy—if that's the right term—an unsavory reputation as bloodthirsty beasts that kill
for pleasure. In part, this image rests on their depredations on domestic livestock, which may strike the
angry livestock owner as excessive and unjustified.
Wolves do indeed kill cattle and sheep—a trait noted from ancient times, as in the fable about the
boy who cried wolf once too often, or in Lord Byron's memorable opening line of “The Destruction
of Sennacherib”: “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold. . . .” Wolves, though, like other
predators, kill only in order to live and not to satisfy some perverted blood-lust. To a wolf, a sheep is
only a slow, dim-witted version of a small deer, and a cow nothing more than a physically challenged
moose, elk, or bison.
In recent years, the North American timber wolf's image has undergone a major refurbishing in some
quarters, though certainly not in others. Led by Farley Mowat's popular topic
Never Cry Wolf
(more
about that later), the wolf has become Mr. Good Guy to many, the persecuted, misunderstood keeper of
sound genetic stock in caribou, moose, elk, deer, and other species, by selectively removing the weak,
the unfit, the sickly, and the old. While this image is based on considerably more truth than are the old
stereotypes of wolf as Bad Guy, it's often grossly overdone.
Conferring predatorial sainthood on the wolf isn't much more edifying than casting the animal in the
role of unredeemed devil. The truth is simply that wolves are wolves and should be viewed on their own
terms as one of the most efficient predators of large North American mammals. As such, they evolved
as part of an ecosystem that predated humans on this continent. Ascribing all manner of human qualit-
ies to them—good or bad—is no help in understanding their place in nature's scheme, both historically
and today.
Wolves are widely thought of as endangered. They aren't—at least as a species—although they're
listed as endangered in the lower forty-eight states. (Minnesota wolves, with an estimated population of
2,500, are listed as threatened, while two reintroduced populations in the West are considered “experi-
mental populations” under the Endangered Species Act.) Despite this endangered status in most of the
United States, there are over fifty thousand wolves in Canada and over seven thousand in Alaska, so
the total number of timber wolves in North America is approximately sixty thousand. Now that wolves
are no longer relentlessly killed, the biggest threat to their long-term survival is habitat loss.
Canis lupus
is Latin for “wolf dog” (
canis,
dog, and
lupus,
wolf), and we say that wolves belong to
the dog family. Actually, this is backward; dogs are members of the wolf family. Domestic dogs have
without question descended from wolves, although the timing and mechanism for this descent is not
well understood.
Until recently, it was pretty much taken for granted that roughly fifteen thousand years ago, our
Stone Age ancestors domesticated a few wolves, thereby creating the dog. One theory is that they
might have raised wolf pups and tamed them. A second theory holds that some wolves, less fearful
