An overview of wolf aggression

One of the questions we are most frequently asked by visitors is whether we get bitten by our wolves. What underlies the need to ask this question is the age-old stereotypical image of the wolf; It glares at us from photographs and snarls menacingly from the covers of books and videos. Indeed, it is uncommon to see a wolf in any other depiction, except for those old black and white pictures in certain well known books showing rows of dead wolves, hanging in front of a trapper's shack, their jaws closed for good by human beings. This has to be one of the most unfair and heavily perpetuated misrepresentations of any animal. We live in an age when it is increasingly unacceptable to portray negative stereotypes of groups in human society in order to perpetuate racial or religious hatred and it is well past time we stopped doing it to animals as well.

So, let's have a look at wolf aggression.

How aggressive are they ?

This is not a very sensible question. Wolves employ aggression when aggression is needed. When it's not, they don't. If you are not well up on canine behaviour and you have browsed our own wolf picture gallery you may have been puzzled by the conspicuous shortage of pictures of bared fangs and blazing eyes. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, they do not spend the majority of their time threatening and killing either each other or anything else. Apart from the breeding season, when tempers tend to run high, the overall ambience of a wolf pack is one of peace and order. Secondly, aggression displays tend to be fast-moving and often quite brief and episodic which makes capturing one on film a little more difficult than other types of scenes (a few visiting photographers have managed to get a few snaps of Peyto and Cheza at it). Prolonged fights which allow people the time to fetch and set up cameras are rare. Aggression is employed for specific purposes only and whilst there are wolves which do use it a little more readily than others, the majority keep it to the minimum needed for their welfare and survival in any given situation. As a social animal, living in families, aggression control is essential for the survival of the species. If wolves really did spend most of their time fighting and injuring each other then they would long since be extinct; no social system can survive unmoderated aggression. Wolves live within a social structure where competition equates to survival and they are also equipped by nature with all the weaponry necessary to kill and maim each other in an instant - and yet, they don't! Why? The startling truth is that far from being arbitrarily aggressive and bloodthirsty, wolves are, in fact, master peacemakers and diplomats. For them, violence and injury are almost always a last resort when all else fails.

When is aggression employed ?

Before answering this, you have to digest these five facts about aggression:

1) Almost all genuine (non-play) wolf aggression is defensive - used to defend or keep possession of something or other.

2) Aggression consists of (just) two very different things - threats and attacks. Note the difference; a threat is not an attack and won't necessarily become one. A wolf will employ a threat or an attack as appropriate in response to whatever it feels is threatening it. A threat may consist of just threatening body language or may go as far as an actual warning snap and is designed specifically NOT to kill the oponent. If you have ever been growled at by a dog or bitten but without leaving a mark then you have been threatened, not attacked.

3) Most wolf aggression is 'social' aggression - behaviour used during interactions with its pack mates and friends

4) A wolf only directs aggression at the animal that caused it. It's very rare for it to redirect at bystanders.

5) Lastly, one thing you need to get clear right now and remember permanently is that prey-killing is NOT aggression. Prey killing is the acquisition of food. No wild animal gets angry with its food. When killing prey, wolves look happy, act happy and are happy. Afterwards they show no sign of remorse. They are designed by nature to be good at killing other animals for food. Their body's are built and their minds are hardwired to do it and enjoy it. A wolf killing a rabbit is not being aggressive, it is being predatory - and enjoying it; No anger, no jealousy, no hate, no aggression! - Ok, got it ? Let's go back to talking about aggression.

Now the difficult part. Here's a list of the aggression modes. No, it's not totally comprehensive and yes, you can make a university course out of arguing about it all, but, broadly speaking, this table contains all the things that motivate a wolf to lose its cool. The three which are in red are special cases - I'll go into why later.

• Resource guarding (consisting of) Food guarding, Object guarding, Place guarding, Mate guarding
• Status guarding / dominance aggression (consisting of) Sparring, Challenging, Dominating
• Self defence against attack
• Fear
• Maternal guarding
• Territory guarding
• Bullying of an omega wolf

Now let's consider each of these types of aggression.

Resource Guarding: To survive, a wolf must obtain and keep a number of things. Food is the most obvious item but, like man, wolves live not by bread alone; other things matter highly to them as well. To understand why, you need to look not just at their physical needs but at their social structure as well. Wolves live in a hierarchical system with a top-dog leader (alpha) and clearly defined ranks descending downward all the way to the lowest rank. Actually, there are two hierarchies in a wolf pack - one for the females and one for the males, but the rules within each are essentially the same. Any wolf will try to maintain its rank (with the exception of omegas) and most will take any opportunity to increase it. The benefits of higher rank are self evident and are basically the same as they would be in human society - more food, more comfort, better survival chances, better breeding prospects etc. How a wolf gains and maintains its rank within the hierarchy is a whole subject on its own but one of the major factors is the extent to which a particular animal can claim and control access to resources. The more control it has and the more it can keep for itself the more important it is - and 'importance' is obviously a key concept in rank and status. Wolves are born to possess. Anything which is of use or even just of interest is a desirable item to them and they will do their best to take posession of it and keep it. The benefits of food-guarding hardly need explanation but what about place guarding and object guarding and so on ?

Places have value to a wolf for many reasons. For example, a good safe sleeping place is important as is a good sunning place or a good lookout position. Some places may have special associations for a particular wolf - something extra pleasant may have happened there or may happen there regularly. Controlling access to a place for example by a narrow passage or pass or doorway of some kind also confers importance the animal doing the controlling. Any of these reasons may cause a wolf to want to exclude other wolves from a particular position or place.

Object guarding is a little less obvious. To understand it you have to be aware that wolves are inveterately curious and nosey and very highly intelligent. Each item of knowledge or skill that a wolf gains adds to its importance and thereby to its status. Firstly, instinct tells them that any novel object - a stick, a piece of cloth and unusual stone or pretty well anything - could be of value, even if only as a chew toy. To possess it is to gain advantage; to investigate and understand it is to gain more advantage. Secondly, wolves simply enjoy investigating and exploring. These activities exercise their considerable intelligence and often provide opportunities for the most enjoyable passtime of all - play. For these reasons and a few others I won't go into here, any novelty object can be a source of excitement and rivalry in a wolf pack. The rarer an object is in their environment, the more valuable it is and the more they all want it - and the more the possessor wants to keep control of it.

Mate guarding. This is mostly the province of the alpha male of the pack. During the breeding season he will stick as close as he can to his chosen female, partly to keep any other male away from her and partly to ensure that he is there when (if) she eventually says 'yes'. He will threaten and drive off any other male which gets too close to his mate. The alpha female will also usually try to prevent any other female getting off with any of the males.

Status guarding is a special kind of guarding because here, the wolf is not defending anything tangible - no toys, mates or food visible. Much of it looks to human observers like unprovoked attack and offensive aggression but this is far from the truth. You have to remember that wolves read each others' attitudes and intentions via their body language as easily as we read each others' by speech and facial expression. They can also smell each others' hormone balance and thereby detect each others' state of mind in a way which we cannot. At any given moment any wolf can do something unnoticable to us which its superiors may read as blatantly disrespectful and they will normally respond to the challenge. These facts provide much of the explanation for apparently arbitrary outbursts of aggression which can occasionally occur in a wolf pack, especially in the breeding season when hormones are running high. They explain, for example, the relentless bullying which an alpha female can sometimes inflict on a subordinate female. Here, the subordinate female is effectively competing (albeit involuntarily) with the alpha for her position as chief fertile female and the alpha defends her position by impressing her rank upon the subordinate. The more fertile the subordinate smells - and the more high-status she may try to act - the more the alpha tries to keep her in her place. The status guarding behaviours are all triggered by some quality in the appearance or behaviour of another animal which a) gives the observing animal some cause for fearing that competition is about to arise and b) encourages it to believe that it can win.

The most commonly observed piece of status guarding behaviour is the act of 'dominating' another animal. When a superior wolf dominates an inferior one it typically mounts the back of the inferior and waits for - or encourages - the inferior to submit (roll over). If it doesn't - or sometimes, even if it does - the superior may snarl or grip the inferior's neck in its jaws. Usually, the superior will increase the threat until the inferior either submits or breaks free. If it breaks free then you will see the next most common bit of status guarding behaviour - dominance sparring. This behaviour looks and sounds like a simple fight; lots of noise, fangs and action.

The least commonly observed piece of status guarding behaviour is the full dominance challenge. This is a maximum threat display and is used by a subordinate animal against a superior specifically in order to force a fight for rank - winner takes all! Actual challenges are not a common behaviour at all and you are not very likely to see them outside the breeding season. What you are likely to see is the exact same threat posture and body language used simply as a heavy threat - not a challenge - at any time of year. The challenged animal (superior) cannot ignore a full challenge; it has to respond by either confronting the challenger or backing down. If it backs down then it has lost its rank to the challenger. If it fights it may still lose both the fight and its rank but it won't necessarily be injured in the process.

Self defence against attack doesn't need much explanation. It is very rare for packmates to attack each other with the intent to kill. About the only time this would normally happen is at the height of the hormone riot of the breeding season and even then, usually only between rival females.

Fear is a big attack motivator for both dogs and wolves although it is unlikely that fear-motivated attacks would arise within a pack. These kind of attacks are usually aimed at things which are not wolves. The first instinct of a wolf confronted by something it is afraid of is to run away. It will only stand and fight or attack if it a) has something important to defend and thinks it might win the fight or b) cannot get away. One way in which fear can motivate a threat or an attack on a pack member is when a wolf feels vulnerable. This can include situations where it is in pain or disabled in some way The aggression is motivated by the fact that it's likely that other members of the pack could take (social) advantage of it. A wolf which can't fight back can be beaten up and is at risk of losing its rank in the pack. This is the reason why dogs which are in pain will often bite the person trying to help them. It is not accidental or the result of mental confusion, it is canine self-defence.

Maternal guarding is just the instinct of a mother to defend her children. A female wolf will defend her cubs ferociously but it is notable that wild wolves are so terrified of humans that they will not even defend their cubs against an approaching human. This gives those 'hunters' who enjoy killing cubs in the den - and there are many of them - the opportunity to enjoy their passtime without the bothersome worry of being hurt by the mother animal - if they haven't already killed her. This behaviour can be used either against an invading predator - such as a bear - or by a low status female which has given birth to cubs and fears that the alpha female might kill them - which does sometimes happen.

Territory guarding arises from the fact that any given area of land can only support just so many wolves. Left to their own devices, wolf packs divide up the land between them with each pack claiming as much as it can defend. Any wolf intruding into another pack's territory will be usually be attacked and most often, killed - one of the commonest causes of death for wolves. There is a slight problem in deciding whether territory guarding is a defensive or offensive behaviour. This is because it is not at all clear to what extent the wolf is consciously and altruistically defending its territory or just selfishly indulging the adult wolf's natural xenophobia which gives rise to the territorial guarding behaviours in the first place.

Bullying of an omega is another behaviour which leaves some doubt about its offensive / defensive motivation and it can certainly be regarded as a special case of status guarding. An omega animal is one which is of such low status that it is effectively off the bottom of the hierarchy ladder and used as a punch bag by all the other animals. It is not clear whether omegas actually lack social ambition or just lack sufficient opportunity to indulge it - there is evidence both ways - but whichever it is, something about them releases uninhibited social bullying behaviour in other wolves. Most zoos with large packs have an omega and close examination will often reveal patches of missing fur and sore flesh where its pack mates have pulled and nipped at it. Omegas can be bullied right out of the pack and occasionally even bullied to death but taking things this far is counter-productive for the pack because the omegas do have one useful role - they make good puppy sitters in the cub season.

Much of the aggression which human beings see among wolves is not in fact, serious threat or violence. A good deal of wolf play - and they play a lot - involves noisy sparring and wrestling and they enjoy the whole thing greatly without any intention of inflicting injury. Nevertheless, one important thing to remember about wolf-play is that it does have consequence for the animals. During play, wolves probe and exploit each others' weaknesses and they can learn much of value about each others' characters in the process. The information they acquire this way is all grist to the mill of the social status drive. Some authorities have even expressed doubt that wolf-play can actually be counted as play at all because most of it is so relentlessly and obviously hierarchical character probing and strength testing.

Social Testing: There is one final category of aggression which must be mentioned and that is the process of social testing. This behaviour is yet another way in which wolves find and maintain their place in the social hierarchy and it involves producing deliberately disrespectful and quasi-aggressive behaviour. It is designed purely to test other animals' characters. Wolves are complete social opportunists and exploit each others' physical and mental weaknesses ruthlessly to gain and keep social status. Testing consists largely of mock-attack moves and threatening body language and offers them a chance to evaluate their pack-mates' strength of will, bravery and gullibility.

Well, that's a brief summary of the aggression modes. So, how far do they affect us humans ?

Referring back to the table, all the modes of aggression can be used in wolf-wolf interaction but the only ones a wild wolf would ever employ against a human are the ones in red - and even then, only if you could ever get close enough to one (which you won't). These three behaviours - and sometimes food-guarding against scavengers - are the ones which a wolf will use against other animals such as bears. The rest of the behaviours are reserved exclusively for wolf-wolf interaction. No wild wolf regards humans as wolves and even if they dared to get close to us they would not indulge any of those behaviours on us.

Ok, that's wild wolves, but what about socialised wolves ?

When we socialise a wolf we encourage it to accept human beings as wolves-by-proxy. The exact psychological mechanism of this is very complex and a rich stamping ground for academic debate, but to put it simply, imagine for a moment that wolves have two boxes inside their brains; one is designed to hold a template description of the type of animal they are and which they must trust in life and the other holds a description of the type of animal it must fear and loath. The one that holds the 'fear-it' description is hardwired - built in from birth by genetics - and it contains a good, accurate picture of a human being. It can't be erased or modified. Thousands of years of persecution, torture and slaughter by humans have put it there - and it's there for life. The 'trust-it' box starts out with a hazy picture of a wolf in it and is gradually topped up with a picture of whichever animal tends the infant creature in its first weeks of life. By hand-raising a wolf from a time before its eyes open we arrange for that box to contain both the wolf image and a human image. As they grow up, socialised wolves will treat whichever animal whos picture is in the 'trust-it' box as a wolf and on average, the 'trust-it' box is always a stronger influence than the 'fear-it' box. Thus, we finish up with an adult wolf which both trusts us and indulges almost the full gamut of its wolf behaviour upon us. We become, in effect, pack members and we are quite likely to be subjected to all the aggression modes listed in the table. We do, in fact, impose a limit on how far they regard us as wolves though, because there are a number of other behaviours that we certainly don't want aimed at us - mating for one!. To do this, we have to make sure that they do know that we are not actually wolves and we do that by introducing the cubs gradually to an adult dog or wolf. They instinctively recognise their own kind and bond to it, thus making sure that our picture is not the only - or strongest - one in the 'trust-it' box.

That probably sounds disastrous. Surely, the last thing anyone would want is to be treated, even partly, as a wolf by a wolf. After all, wolves are arbitrarily aggressive creatures - they could attack us at any time couldn't they ?

No! If you still think that way then re-read the information above until you realise that wolves are far from arbitrarily aggressive. Remember, their aggression is reserved for specific purposes and released by specific things. Apart from social testing, if a pack-member does nothing to release aggression then aggression will not arise - and that goes for humans interacting with them too. There are, of course, a number of ways a human being could release wolf aggression inadvertantly and that is one of the reasons why people who interact regularly with socialised wolves need special training and a full understanding of the subject so that they remain in control and out of trouble.

So, what happens when aggression does occur ?

Wolves have only one means of enforcing their will - their teeth. But therein lies a dilemma. If they used them carelessly or arbitrarily then injury would be common, infected wounds would quickly cripple the pack and mutual trust would evaporate. The pack would disintegrate. Wolves solved this problem long before the human race even had language, let alone words like 'aggression'. What they invented was 'bite-inhibition'. Put simply, this means that in any non life-threatening interaction with a pack member - and that includes human members of the pack - all biting is automatically restricted to a force just gentle enough to make contact but not to break the skin. Under wolf law, breaking the skin of a pack mate without due provocation is illegal; the penalty is ostracisation and the consequence loss of status, loss of friends and even eviction from the pack.

Wolves (and dogs) teach each other bite inhibition as puppies during play. They learn fast and by 8 weeks old are fully capable of controlling their bite in the face of virtually any provocation. The whole art is perfected as they continue to grow and play (something dogs miss out on through being taken from the litter at 8 weeks old) and an adult wolf will use its jaws and teeth as precisely and tenderly as humans use their hands and fingers. There is nothing arbitrary about the force with which a wolf bites an opponent or aggressor. It knows exactly what it is doing and exactly what the consequences are. There are, of course, exceptions. For example, when a wolf geniunely believes that its life is in danger or its cubs are at risk or sometimes if a confrontation escalates far out of control - usually during the breeding season - then biting can become hard and injury or death can occur.

So, wolves protect each other - and us - from bite injury but they have two other levels of protection too: First, under wolf law, apart from a prey attack, no attack is permitted without warning. Although, once again, exceptions can arise in extremes, a wolf will always threaten first, then attack. Not the other way round. They always give each other the chance to back down or de-escalate the situation. Second, nature and evolution have equipped them with a rich body language with which to communicate threat, appeasement, submission and calming signals amongst other things. The whole body language of threat and calming signals combined with bite inhibition permits them to settle disputes largely by ritual sparring and noisy, snarling bluff and without injury.

So, do they bite us ?

Yes, sometimes. Our handlers are trained to avoid getting into situations where they are likely to get bitten and they are taught how to identify and de-escalate problem situations. Even so, occasionally a wolf decides to ask us bluntly to butt out. They do so, of course with their teeth but with the characteristic gentleness of their species, they do so with respect and concern for our safety and welfare and they ensure that our skin is not broken. Shame you can't say the same for most human aggression!

Have a look at this picture and see if you can answer the questions.

The wolf on the left is threatening his brother on the right.

Is the wolf on the right frightened ?

Which wolf is definitely confident ?

Is the wolf on the right doing anything to prevent this escalating into a fight ?

Do you think the person standing behind them is in danger ?

Do you think only wolves behave like this - or do dogs do this too ?

Do you think this scene ended in injury ?