Reasons why Wolves Tend to Live in Packs

The largest member of the canine family is the wolf, the ancestor of almost all dogs known today. The males can get up to 95-99 lbs. and the females can get up to 79-85 lbs. Wolves tend to live together in groups called packs, a group of animals living and hunting together, a pack on average consists of 5-11 wolves at a time. There are 1-2 adults, 3-6 juveniles, and 1-3 yearlings, and sometimes you will find one or more families grouping together to make a bigger pack. Wolves are very territorial animals and don’t like it when strangers start wandering around their area. Stray wolves will tend to go into other territories in order to join the pack if they left them or to steal food. But why would they be a stray in the first place? Why did they wander away from their pack? How far would they wander off to?

A wolf pack has a basic social unit and it starts with the mated pair, or alpha male and female, then the pack consists of their offspring, and then their offspring going down the line. Wolves are generally committed, mated pairs typically remain together for life, unless one of them dies. Unmated females are uncommon, since, males often prevail in any wolf population. There are “Casanova wolves,” they are wolves that are unable to form a territory or find a mate, that mates with the offspring of already created breeding duos from other packs. Females are able to deliver pups every year, with one litter yearly being the average. If a parent wolf dies or gets separated from the group, another wolf may adopt the pups and keep them as their own.

The wolves have a unique of hunting; it can be divided into five stages. The first stage is locating the prey; the most common way of locating prey is by scent. The breeze carries the sc...

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...ou really want to know where and how far they go, then you would need to put a radio collar on them.

Works Cited

• Gray Wolf . Ed. Ray Coppinger, Will Graves, Steven R. Lindsay, Barry H. Lopez, and David L. Mech. Wikipedia, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. . Path: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf.

• Gray Wolf (2013). In Defender of Wildlife. Retrieved March 24, 2014, from http://www.defenders.org/gray-wolf/basic-facts

• Lindsay, Steven R. (2000). Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training: Adaptation and learning. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 0-8138-0754-9.

• Mech, L. David (1981). The Wolf: The Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1026-6.

• Mech, L. David; Boitani, Luigi (2003). Wolves: Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-51696-2.