10 Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Wolves

Fascinating Facts about Wolves

Wolves are known as elusive species to man. Legends told us about its spiritual nature. However, it had taken years before man attempted to study the natural characteristics of wolves. In this article, we briefly enumerate ten fascinating facts about the nature of wolves:

1. Did you know that wolves cannot be considered as guard dogs? Although some people may have considered an idea of training a wolf to behave like a dog, wolves are wary when it comes to unchartered territory. They are actually timid and do not chase people. They would rather wander away from people’s attention.
   
   
2. Wolves do not hunt and kill people the way they do in folklore stories. It means people are not their targeted prey unless they get provoked. There may have been cases of wolf-keepers death in wolf parks but that is not because wolf wants to eat man but due to mishandling in feeding them.
   
   
3. Wolves can detect motion far better than a man can. They have reduced range of hues that enable them to distinguish color vision and have sharper focus even at long distances. They also have excellent peripheral and night vision because their retina is highly sensitive to movement.
   
   
4. Wolves are exceedingly sensitive to scent recognition. They have about 200 million scent cells compared to humans who may only have about 5 million scent cells.
   
   
5. Their very strong jaws have a crushing pressure of 1500 pounds per square inch compared to a German shepherd having 750 pounds. A hungry wolf can eat as much as 20 pounds of meat that is as much as 100 hamburgers to a human.
   
   
6. Wolves have strong family ties that resemble human families. A male and female wolf that mates stay together for life. They're devoted parents to their pups.
   
   
7. Wolves mate only once a year. After the female gives birth in a deep den, the pack brings solid meat for the mom while soft chewed regurgitated meat is given to her pups while they nested in the den.
   
   
8. The death of a pack member can cause depression in the entire pack. Since wolves are close-knit, an abrupt absence of one can cause them to howl in a way as if they are grieving for losing one.
   
   
9. The pack is always followed by ravens when they hunt. The Ravens may lead them to animal cadavers or nearby prey. The wolves tolerate their winged scavengers.
   
   
10. There’s no connection between the wolves’ howling towards a full moon. They are actually nocturnal. They only project their howls upwards to allow their sound to carry as far as 6 miles in the forest. It is their means of long-distance communication.

In a conclusion, wolves are vital species that exist to support a natural level of predator-prey relationship in the wildlife. Without them, biodiversity will be greatly affected in one way or the other. Let us help protect the wolves from becoming extinct.