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jlf1961 -> RE: The song of the wild (8/2/2017 3:40:55 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DesFIP
Don't leave garbage around so they get used to you feeding them. Adults are very rarely attacked. But small children are seen as prey by many predators.
Actually, and sorry to disagree, wolves are a dichotomy when compared to other predators.
While many predators congregate in groups, wolves are different.
Within the pack there is a completely unique social structure, almost human in nature. In most predator species that live in groups, there is one leader, usually the male, however, in a wolf pack there are two, the alpha male and alpha female, with the leadership roles changing by season, or necessity.
When the alpha female is pregnant, the Alpha male is the supreme voice of the pack, when she delivers, in many respects she becomes the boss, the needs of the pups (feeding, teaching, nurturing) become the primary focus of the pack.
And, it is extended to species of similar social structures.
A healthy human child is less likely to be attacked by normal wolves than a healthy human adult, hence the saying 'raised by wolves.'
In fact, a human is more likely to find acceptance by a pack of wolves than find himself prey, unless the human threatens the pack in some way.
And, to be quite honest, you cannot 'domesticate' a wolf, or even a high content hybrid. You can teach them to accept you as pack leader, and by extension, your family and other pets as their pack.
Once they figure out their place in the 'pack' they will assume the same behavior as a wolf in the wild with the same place in a natural pack. This is one of the reasons that wolves and high content wolf hybrids are considered 'dangerous pets' (humans are, for the most part, stupid and cannot understand the concept of canine socialization training, which is why you end up with dogs that attack for no apparent reason.)
However, for this very reason, wolves and wolf hybrids, become very over protective of the children in a home they may be living in. In the wild, wolves have left healthy children alone. A point that animal behaviorists are still arguing about. Some theories are that wolves became domesticated, and become the common house dog because of the similarity in the social structure between a tribe or family and the pack.
As for the garbage thing, wolves and even stray dogs only go through garbage as a last resort. Strays become feral within weeks of losing the home they are accustomed to.
If there is no prey for wild wolves, they scavenge. If their normal prey becomes scarce, they go after cattle and other live stock (contrary to what ranchers and sheep herders want you to think.) Wolves are strange in this aspect as well, unlike predator cats, such as the cougar which will make a kill and then hide the uneaten portion for later meals, wolves typically do not like rotting flesh, even avoid it when prey is easily available.
But then wolves also will exhibit behavior which seems to be out of a desire to do nothing more than annoy the shit out of humans. For example, the wolf packs in Yellowstone national park routinely dump garbage cans, scatter garbage and never seem to be looking for scraps of food. Instead they seem to be doing it simply to annoy the park workers. There have been cases where soiled disposable diapers have been left at the doors to offices and even the main door to the Inn inside the park.
There was one case where one of the packs actually shit all around one of the rangers vehicles making it necessary to clean up the piles before the ranger could actually get in his truck.
So wolves are not the dumb animals many want them to be, they are intelligent, and seem to possess some kind of sense of humor. They also get used to people in their habitat. A pack that has decided that you are a part of their environment will spend hours close enough to you that you could almost reach out and pet them. In some parks, wolves have been known to share the camp fires of campers during cold nights with no one injured (unnerved maybe, but not injured.)
And each pack is as different as each human family. Each sub species is just as different. The gray wolves that used to haunt the great plains would run down buffalo but not cattle. Timber wolves have been known to relax in the yards of homes (even to the point of using the pool if available) with no harm to the owners.
Mexican gray wolves, a species more akin to the wolves in Mongolia and Siberia than the rest of the American species, seem to be the most curious about humans, and are the most easily spotted of the native wolves. They have been known to sit on ridges or hill tops and watch the activities of humans for hours.
I remember my great grandfather telling me the Cherokee stories about wolves, and how they try to teach humans how to live with the land. He used to say that the reason wolves liked people so much is because we are closer to them than any other creature, and by the same token, wolves watch us to figure out why we lost the secret (he never said what the secret was.)
The wolf was the first animal humans 'domesticated' which says something. Personally, I feel that if humans would get rid of all the laws and bullshit surrounding 'civilization' and adopt the rules of a wolf pack, a lot of the shit that we do to each other would stop.
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