Information> Wolf Inside the Dog
It is commonly accepted that the domestic dog is a descendant of the wolf, Canis lupus, a relationship with humans that began some 15,000 years ago. Sadly, most people are ignorant to the natural lifestyle of our domesticated friends, and though we have gone to great lengths to change the physical and mental structure of this animal, dogs have refused to surrender remnants of their past.
Their territorial predecessors had a remarkable social structure, the Pack, controlled by the Alpha male and female. Though always in competition with each other, the unit worked efficiently as one, co-operating for the benefit of the team- in hunting, defence and puppy rearing. They also established a complex form of communications, a combination of facial expressions, postures and vocalization.
These animals integrated easily into the Human Pack, an assemblage so familiar to their own.
Why does your dog bark, dig holes, insist on laying with you in bed? Is the typical cat chase a game or primal prey drive? Why is he howling in the back yard?
Once you come to realize that your pet dog is a domestic Wolf, you'll find a lot of insight about his quirky characteristics. You may even grasp a greater understanding on how you should act, since you're now both members of the same Pack.
Wolf Facts
Wolves are intelligent and social animals. They have complex social families; they play, teach, and hunt with each other.
There are 4 to 36 wolves in a pack. Two to six of them stay at the den. They have a territory that ranges from 130 to 13,000 km. They will defend it. They eat anything from a mouse to a moose, depending on what is available.
You can tell wolves are friendly ,when they roll over and show their bellies. When they want to play, they put their paws down and wag their tail. When they want to fight, they show their fangs and start growling. When they want to stop they put their ears back and lay down.
A wolf’s sense of smell is 100 times more sensitive than a human’s.
Wolves can hear as far as 6 miles [9.6 kilometres] away in the forest and ten miles [16 kilometres] away on the open tundra.
Rudyard Kipling's book, The Jungle Book (written in 1894), was one of the first novels to show the close social ties of the wolf pack. In the book, wolves are described as 'the Free People."
In Greek mythology, a king named Lycaon was turned into a wolf by the great god Zeus. The Athenians had great respect for the wolf and decreed that any man who killed one had to pay for the funeral for the animal.
The grey wolf, Canis lupus, was once the most widespread terrestrial mammal after humans and lived throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere. In the last 2000 years wolves have been hunted, trapped and poisoned out of many countries. The wolf is now extinct in Mexico and Japan, and extinct over large regions of the US, China and elsewhere. All the wolves in western Europe were exterminated except for a handful in Spain and Italy.
The population of wolves in Ontario is currently being threatened by human impact! For more information, visit Wolves Ontario!
Updated Jan.8, 2004
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