Wolves!

Nature

WOLVES! Man’s Best Friend was once an implacable enemy. Keep your eye on him. By Dick Warner

O

n my walks I’m usually accompanied by a dog. You may be the same. But you should be aware that your animal companion is actually a domesticated European wolf. This was a matter argued about for many years but recent genetic studies have shown that all the dogs in the world are descended from wolves. The proper name for the sub-species is the Eurasian wolf and it seems that the first ones were tamed in central Asia between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago and that this was a one-off event. In other words all modern dogs are descended from a common ancestor and they are almost certainly the first wild animals ever to be tamed by humans.

In Europe the wolf is one of the largest and most potentially dangerous of all predators, so it’s not surprising that it has become the bad guy in folklore, fairy-tales and mythology. But Little Red Riding Hood’s nemesis is generally portrayed by modern biologists as the victim of atrocity stories. The politically correct statement today is to say that wolf attacks on humans are almost unknown and that they are benign and beautiful creatures. Well, I checked the data and this isn’t totally true. Unfortunately wolves have killed a lot of people in the past and continue to kill small numbers today.

One of the statistics I dug up was that in Russia, between 1840 and 1861, 273 people were reported to the authorities as being killed by non-rabid wolves and that an astonishing 269 of these were children. In France between 1580 and 1830 3,069 people were killed by wolves, 1,857 of these were killed by non-rabid wolves. Wolf killings are still being reported in small numbers from eastern Russia.

Curiously enough the wolf tends to have a rather different reputation in Irish folklore.

There are a few references to wolves attacking livestock but I’ve only come across one that refers to wolf attacks on humans. The Annals of Connaught mention that in the winter of 1420 wolves killed many people. This is outweighed by a large number of accounts of friendships between wolves and humans, particularly human saints and holy men.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of these is the story of the werewolves of Ossory recounted by that indefatigable Norman journalist Giraldus Cambrensis in the 12th century. It’s a long story but the gist of it is that a priest on a journey camped one night on the edge of a forest in the diocese of Ossory and was approached by an elderly but pious werewolf who asked him to perform the last rites over his wife, also a werewolf, who was dying of an arrow wound inflicted by a hunter. The priest wrestles with his conscience because he knows that the last rites are supposed to be reserved for humans and not dispensed to wolves but all ends happily when he anoints the dying she wolf and her husband is very grateful..

Wolves were fairly common in Ireland up until recent historical times. Customs House records indicate that in the 1500s between 100 and 300 wolf pelts a year were exported from Dublin to Bristol. By this time the wolf was extinct in England and Wales, though it still survived in the highlands of Scotland.

“In Europe the wolf is one of the largest and most potentially dangerous of all predators, so it’s not surprising that it has become the bad guy in folklore, fairy-tales and mythology.”

Mary Queen of Scots enjoyed wolf hunting in Atholl. In 1652 a public hunt was organised to eradicate wolves from Castleknock, now one of the inner suburbs of west Dublin. And in 1698 an Alderman of Cork City wrote a letter complaining about the large number of wolves and foxes roaming in and around the city.

It was really Cromwell who finished off the Irish wolf. He granted land to many English settlers who were outraged to find wolves still roaming across it. So in 1653 the Cromwellian Parliament decreed a bounty of £5 on male wolves and £6 on females. This was serious money in those days and wolf numbers declined rapidly as they were persecuted by bounty hunters and their forest habitat declined.

In 1786 John Watson of Ballydarton in County Carlow was suffering sheep losses to a lone wolf with a den on Mount Leinster.

He organised a hunt and his wolfhound killed the predator. It’s the last authenticated record of a wolf in Ireland.

There are several species of wolf in he world, most of them extremely endangered, like the Ethiopian wolf, the Indian wolf or the red wolf of the southern United States, which actually became extinct in the wild in

1980 but is being reintroduced from zoobred specimens. But the species we’re dealing with here, by far the least endangered, exists in a number of debatable sub-species, all across the northern hemisphere and has a number of English names, including grey wolf, timber wolf, and northern wolf.

Despite enormous pressures from humans wolves still survive in significant numbers in Europe. The total population, excluding European Russia, is estimated to be between 18,000 and 25,000 animals. The bulk of these are in Poland, Romania and the Balkans. But if you go hill-walking abroad you could be lucky enough to spot these very shy animals in other countries because there are relict populations in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Finland. They are also spreading and have recently recolonised France, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

I am fascinated by wolves and have devoted quite a bit of time and energy to looking for them. I’ve only been successful twice, once in western Canada and once in the Carpathian mountains of Romania. The wolves in both countries looked quite different. The Canadian one was much larger and much hairier than the Romanian one. The literature suggests that this is what is to be expected.

Nature “In 1786 John Watson of Ballydarton in County Carlow was suffering sheep losses to a lone wolf with a den on Mount Leinster. He organised a hunt and his wolfhound killed the predator. It’s the last authenticated record of a wolf in Ireland.”

Southern European wolves are quite small and have been separated into various slightly dubious sub-species such as the Italian Wolf and the Iberian Wolf. But there is some evidence to suggest that the extinct British and Irish wolves belonged to an Arctic sub species that was much larger.

Wolves have evolved to hunt animals larger than themselves, usually hoofed animals such as species of deer, bison or wild horse. But they’re adaptable creatures and one population on a large Arctic island preys exclusively on hares, which are the biggest animals available to it. The Ethiopian wolf, which is a different species, hunts even smaller prey like mice and voles. One population of European wolves in northern Spain seems to survive today purely by killing

livestock. Scandinavian wolves, on the other hand, specialise in moose (sometimes called elk) which are truly enormous beasts.

European wolves and North American grey wolves are very closely related - they are certainly the same species - but there are some behavioural differences. In Canada and the United States wolves tend to form large packs of up to sixty animals, European wolves tend to live in much smaller family groups, typically of less than a dozen individuals. The differences have probably developed because North America has much larger wilderness areas than Europe and also supports large herds of prey animals like caribou that can provide a food sources for a bigger group of predators.

Irish wolves probably hunted deer and a lot

of wild pigs, a species that became extinct in this country shortly before the wolf did. They also posed quite a threat to livestock. Under Brehon Law a contract to rent a farm often contained a clause obliging the the tenant to keep one or more wolfhounds and to organise hunts as frequently as once a week.

In parts of Britain, and even in this country, there are occasionally calls for wolves to be reintroduced to control rapidly expanding deer populations. It’s a nice idea but not really a runner. The feelings that farmers have for their livestock have created problems for the programmes to reintroduce large birds of prey. They pose virtually no real threat to farm animals, but wolves certainly would. That’s why we exterminated them in the first place.