Wolves have been feared, hunted, mythologised and, for most of recorded history, badly misunderstood. Almost none of the reputation holds up.

Here are forty-two things that are actually true about them, grouped so you can find the interesting ones.

The animal itself

• The gray wolf is called the timber wolf in North America and the Arctic wolf in the far north. All are the same species.
• Wolves are the largest members of the dog family.
• They walk on their toes rather than their feet, which lets them stop and turn sharply and saves wear on the pads.
• A wolf's jaw closes with around 103 bar of pressure. A large domestic dog manages roughly half that.
• Those jaws carry 42 teeth, built for stabbing, shearing and crushing bone, and they open wider than a dog's.
• Wolves are not especially fast, topping out around 45 to 50 km/h. They catch prey by outlasting it, not outrunning it.
• Hearing and smell do the finding. Sight is the least important of the three.
• The gray wolf is the most widespread large land mammal on earth after humans and cattle.
• Despite the name, gray wolves are frequently black or white. Our article on the black wolf explains where the dark coat comes from.

How they eat

• A wolf can take as much as 9 kg of meat in a single sitting in extreme cases, though 3 to 4 kg is a more typical meal.
• They can go more than a week without eating at all. Feast and fast is the normal pattern.
• Whatever the pack cannot finish is left for scavengers, which is why a wolf kill feeds ravens, foxes and bears as well.
• Coastal wolves in British Columbia swim between islands and eat crabs, clams and shellfish.
• The same population fishes. During the salmon run, wolves catch fish directly from the rivers.
• Wolves also eat birds, fish, lizards, snakes and fruit, which is not what the reputation suggests.
• A single wolf can bring down a deer alone. A pack takes elk and moose.

Species and subspecies

• Two wolf species are generally recognised: Canis lupus and Canis rufus, the red wolf.
• Canis lupus contains around 38 subspecies, including the timber, Arctic, tundra, lobo and buffalo wolves.
• The red wolf is smaller, longer in the leg and shorter in the coat. Many biologists still question whether it is a separate species at all, which our article on the red wolf covers.

Cubs and breeding

• Newborn cubs cannot urinate unaided. The mother has to massage the belly with her tongue to start them off.
• Wolves breed once a year, in winter.
• Cubs arrive in late April or early May, in an underground den.
• A litter is usually four to six cubs.
• They grow fast and are close to full size by the end of their first winter, reaching adult size at two years.
• Wolf pairs generally stay together for life.
• Every adult in a pack helps raise the cubs, carrying food back and guarding them while the others hunt.

Life in the pack

• A pack is a family: a breeding pair and their young from several years. Our article on how wolf packs are formed explains why the old alpha-beta-omega ranking does not describe wild wolves.
• Packs usually run to five to ten animals.
• Wolves form strong social bonds and will put themselves at risk to protect the family.
• They travel up to 20 km in a day. In the far north, packs cover hundreds of kilometres a year following migrating herds.
• A wolf that has left or been driven from its pack is a lone wolf. It avoids other packs and, notably, rarely howls. Announcing yourself is only useful if you have somebody to answer.
• A lone wolf that does howl is calling for its own pack. Group howls are usually aimed at rival packs.
• Wolves sometimes howl simply because a neighbouring pack has started, much as dogs set each other off.

Territory

• Packs hold territories far larger than they strictly need, which guarantees prey through bad years.
• Territory size tracks prey density. Where food is plentiful, ranges shrink.
• Biologists describe wolf territory as spatio-temporal rather than purely spatial. Packs move through each other's ground depending on how recently the boundary was marked, so the map has a time dimension as well as an area.

Wolves and people

• Wolves were probably first tamed in East Asia around 15,000 years ago, before agriculture existed.
• The Cherokee did not hunt wolves, believing the dead animal's brothers would take revenge, and that the weapon used would never shoot straight again.
• Around the year 800, Charlemagne founded the Louveterie, a dedicated wolf-hunting corps. It ran until 1789, was revived in 1814, and the last wolf in France was killed in 1927.
• The last wolf in England was killed around 1500, in Ireland in 1770, and in Denmark in 1772.
• Between 1883 and 1918, over 80,000 wolves were killed in Montana alone for bounty payments.
• Wolves were once put on trial as criminals and executed, including by burning.
• The disease lupus takes its name from the Latin for wolf. Eighteenth-century doctors thought the facial rash looked like a wolf bite, and some believed it was caused by one.
• Viking warriors wore wolf skins and were said to drink wolf blood before battle. They called wolves hrægifr, corpse trolls, and treated them as companions on the battlefield.
• In North America the gray wolf population was around two million in 1600. Today it is roughly 65,000, with a world population near 150,000.
• Remus Lupin, the werewolf in the Harry Potter books, carries the joke twice: lupus is Latin for wolf, and Remus was the twin suckled by one at the founding of Rome.

The argument that is still running

Wolves have returned to much of their old range, in Europe by walking back across it themselves and in parts of North America through reintroduction. That is a conservation success and a live political problem at the same time.

Wolves take livestock. They also compete with hunters for elk. The old conflict over land and food resumed the moment the animal came back, and it has not been settled anywhere.

The decline was never only about shooting, either. Wolves lost their prey base as wild herds were replaced by protected livestock, which is a harder problem to reverse than a bounty scheme.

Whether wolves stay depends on whether people are prepared to live alongside them. That, rather than biology, is what the next century of this comes down to.

If the animal has your attention

For children, a wolf is usually the first way into caring about wildlife at all, and a soft toy does more of that work than a documentary. Our wolf plush toy collection runs from pocket-sized companions up to genuinely large pieces.

For everyone else, our wolf painting collection covers the animal in forest and snow, and our wolf jewelry collection carries it in steel and silver.