Reblogging for that fascinating post:
One other aspect of wolf behavior is important here. While wolves are inquisitive and curious, and have a desire to investigate novel items and situations, most of them paradoxically also tend to be very risk-averse and even nervous. They are especially frightened of people, but many can by frightened by practically anything unfamiliar. I’ve observed captive wolves that had been given a closed cardboard box with a treat inside it refuse to approach the box for many minutes, clearly very uneasy about it, and even upon finally approaching it, just tentatively swiping at it with their paws over and over, each time leaping backwards in case it somehow turned into some sort of threat—despite the fact that it was given to them by people they knew well and had given them enrichment hundreds of times before, and that they could certainly smell the treat inside the box.
This behavior is seemingly due to a combination of the natural moderate cautiousness and risk-aversion necessary for any animal’s survival, learned heightened caution, and natural selection: wolves that were too bold around people have for centuries been killed. In a few rare places in the world where wolves have not been exposed to humans for a long period of time, most notably Ellesmere Island, NU in the Canadian high Arctic, they show little to no fear of people, and have allowed scientists to literally sit right next to them and observe them from a few feet away without caring or paying them any attention.
Wolves, and canids generally, appear to be very susceptible to contracting rabies relative to a number of other species (Bleck and Rupprecht 2009:913; Hanlon 2013:181-182), and rabid wolves have a spectacularly aggressive furious phase, in which they will rampage through an area attacking and biting everyone and everything in sight until being further weakened by the disease or stopped by human intervention. For example, in the Lorges Forest in France on April 25, 1851, a single rabid wolf bit 41 people and 96 animals over a period of seven hours across 45 kilometers (Linnell et al. 2002:19).
Obviously wolves, like any animal, may attack if they feel significantly threatened or cornered, or to defend their den, rendezvous site, or other pack members. Still, it’s actually remarkable how rarely they do this. Their preference is almost always to retreat rather than fight, and even in extreme circumstances they rarely resort to violence. For the most remarkable example, one might think that the one instance in which you’re almost guaranteed to be attacked by a wolf is if you too closely approach a den or pup, but this turns out to be wrong. There have been many cases in which people have approached or even actively interfered with a den and the adult wolves have reacted with distress, but have not attacked. For instance, a team of scientists once placed cameras inside 16 active dens, and in no cases did the wolves attack them, but merely stood nearby and howled and barked/bark-howled (an alarm/distress signal) until the researchers left (McNay 2002:20). Most amazingly, an ornithologist once took a pup from a den and brought it to his tent, and the pup’s mother simply followed him and “slept outside his tent until he released the pup” (Mech 1990:85, emphasis added).
The behavior of herding dogs is also identical to hunting behavior in wolves, with all the same series of steps involved in eyeing, stalking, circling or rushing alongside prey, in some cases nipping at them, etc. Humans have simply bred herding dogs to strongly retain that suite of predatory behaviors, in the same order, while lopping off the very last step of the hunting sequence where the wolf inflicts massive debilitating bites or lunges for the throat.
“In Poland in the 1950’s . . . a young female teacher . . . was reported as being killed by wolves. Her shoes and purse were found with bite marks, together with fragments of her dress and lots of blood. Forty years later she returned to Poland alive and well,” having been smuggled out of the country by her boyfriend all those years before to escape the communist regime, “and they had used the ruse of being killed by wolves to prevent the government from punishing her family”
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