Welcoming the Wolf at the Door

One of the nation’s largest breeding facilities, the Wolf Conservation Center has released 17 Mexican gray wolves and 3 red wolves to the wild since the early 2000s. “A wild life is enriching and fulfilling and allows wolves to live out fully what it means to be a wolf,” says Regan Downey, director of education and advocacy.

Numbering as many as two million before European settlement of what is now the United States, by the mid-20th century wolves had been hunted to near extinction. This was done mainly to protect the developing livestock industry, according to the National Park Service. We now have extensive evidence showing that wolves prefer to chase wild prey and, in doing so, keep the environment stable and healthy.

Going wild

To prepare wolves for release, the conservation center keeps their lives as natural as possible. Its forested enclosures aren’t visible to the public, and the wolves’ diet is mostly road-killed deer so they won’t develop a taste for beef and other farm animals. Their primary contact with humans is during their annual health check.

Shots! Blood draws! “For those ten minutes, they’re terrified,” Downey says. Staffers sympathize but know these encounters are not just important for their health but life-saving lessons, validating their natural fear of humans. Indeed, studies show that the most terrifying sound to a wolf is that of the human voice.

A few wolves at the conservation center came here after being hand raised and thereby acclimated to humans. They are considered “ambassador” wolves and will always remain here, taking part in events such as school visits, birthday parties and public sleepovers (with a fence between you and them!).

The conservation center recently sent five energetic young brothers to the Columbus Zoo, in Ohio. “The boys,” as their keeper, Cat Collins, calls them, continually surprise the staff with their antics. They wrestle, play tug-of-war with their food and run races around their enclosure in the zoo’s new 8-acre North American Trek exhibit. The area’s highlights include a dazzling waterfall and leafy enclosures for other iconic American animals—bald eagles, black bears, otters and the like.

Adult wolves might go to a zoo, as the five brothers did, to the wild or to another breeding facility. Each winter, FWS does an annual count of Mexican gray wolves in particular, according to Downey. “They do helicopter surveys, and they will catch, collar and do a health exam for as many wolves as they can,” she says. The population of endangered wolves is widely microchipped, so individually identified information from the health checks, including DNA testing, can be placed in a computer database.

The wolves’ genetic profiles are examined, and adults are paired to produce maximum genetic diversity from the limited number of breeding individuals available, Downey says. This happens at annual meetings of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ global conservation program—SAFE, or Saving Animals from Extinction. Attendees include representatives of FWS and state and tribal wildlife agencies, as well as experts like ecologists, biologists and veterinarians. The group decides if it would be advantageous to move any wolves, or pairs, to another home.

Lighthawk, a volunteer aviation group that supports environmental issues, transports wolves to their new wild homes in Arizona, New Mexico or North Carolina via private planes, according to conservation center curator Rebecca Bose. She has accompanied both adult wolves and pups on numerous flights. “I can’t say enough good about Lighthawk,” she says. Without it and the opportunity it offers to feed the animals and keep them warm and calm during the flight, she’s not sure transfers would go so easily.

Family values

Captive-born pups are taken to wild dens to join similarly-aged newborns. Last year, five pups from the conservation center were joined in the wild by newborns from wolf breeders nationwide, including six from the Endangered Wolf Center, in Eureka, Missouri, and seven from Brookfield Zoo Chicago, in Brookfield, Illinois. The 27 Mexican gray wolf pups fostered in eight wild dens in 2024 made it a record year and a step forward in increasing the species’ genetic diversity.

Wild wolves readily accept the new family members, according to Dr. Ron Sutherland, chief scientist of Wildlands Network, a continent-wide conservation group. “Mother wolves are pre-programmed to love and cherish,” he says.

When pups are nursing and their mothers can’t leave them to catch their own food, father wolves bring home game and lay it across the front of the den, Bose has observed. Soon, mom joins dad on hunting trips, while offspring from previous years babysit. (Go here to see a young wolf look after boisterous younger siblings.) 

Wolves have notably stable families, with bonds spanning generations. The five brothers now at the Columbus Zoo had helped their parents raise a succession of litters, says Collins. “They’ve been together their whole lives.”

“It’s undeniable that within the family context, wolves take care of each other, they bring back food for each other,” Sutherland says. They’re monogamous (“Better at it than humans!” he quips) and live in packs of about eight. Leaders, sometimes called alphas, are typically the mother and father of succeeding generations. Additional relatives may be part of the pack as well. As youngsters mature, they break off to find a territory and a mate and form a pack of their own.

A pack’s life is one of unceasing cooperation: eating, sleeping, hunting and traveling together. According to the advocacy group Project Coyote, wolves’ skills encompass coordinated hunting, during which each individual is continually aware of the others’ position in space; the ability to communicate over distances; and readiness to adjust their hunting method quickly to fit the unique evasive actions of particular prey.  

Elders are vital. The presence of elders is the best predictor of a wild pack’s success in its continual territorial battles with rivals, according to Kira Cassidy, a researcher with the National Park Service’s Yellowstone Wolf Project. Though practiced fighters can lead a small pack to defeat a larger one, oldsters do not always choose to fight, Cassidy writes in an article in Earth Archives. They steer their pack away from conflict if experience tells them they probably won’t win.

“Leadership and experience make old wolves the most valuable individuals in the pack during aggressive encounters,” writes Cassidy.

Crying wolf

For millennia, humans have had a high-drama, but ambivalent, view of wolves. Some ancient legends feature nurturing figures, like Lupa, the she-wolf who cared for orphaned Romulus and Remus, baby sons of the god Mars and eventual founders of Rome. Blood-curdling tales include slavering wolves pursuing horse-drawn sleighs through snowy Russian forests. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf derives from centuries of stories about malevolent wolves preying on defenseless humans.

Many in the U.S. livestock industry still demand extermination of wolves. And yet, a 2023 report from the USDA found that sickness, old age, extreme weather and other non-predator causes felled almost all—97.6%—of the 1.7 million cattle lost nationwide in one year.

All predators—coyotes, vultures, bears and so on—were together responsible for the remaining 2.4%. The Humane Society of the United States examined USDA data for each predator species and found that wolves had caused a mere .009% of the cattle losses.

The USDA report also described the livestock industry increasingly fending off predators with non-lethal techniques. These include guard dogs, range riders and fright tactics like colored flags attached to fences to scare off predators. According to FWS, in 2009 Congress provided special help for livestock owners, appropriating ongoing funds to compensate for predation.

Fall guys

Despite the compensation, despite the statistics, Downey says, “Wolves are scapegoated.” Collins agrees, saying they are often portrayed as monsters. This hardly reflects reality, she says. “They can be deterred by as little as cloth tied to a fence and blowing in the wind.”

Still, many American politicians seem determined to identify with Little Red Riding Hood. In states in the northern Rockies, wolves are not covered by the Endangered Species Act. Former Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) is widely understood to have helped pushed this through in 2011 to appeal to Montana voters and save his Senate seat. Montana’s quota for the number of wolves that may be destroyed during the 2025–26 season is 558.

In Idaho there’s both no limit to the number that may be killed and a bounty program. In May 2021, Idaho Press reported that a new state law expanded the ways wolves could be destroyed there, including shooting from the air and hunting with snowmobiles, ATVs and night-vision equipment.

Later that year, federal agents killed eight pups in their den in Idaho, alarming students at a nearby high school, the Washington Post reported. Studying the local wolf pack had been part of the school’s curriculum for 20 years. “The pups didn’t do anything,” a shocked student told the newspaper.

Even in states covered by the Endangered Species Act, wolves can have unpredictable futures. In 2020, Colorado voters endorsed re-introduction of wolves to the state. Ten wolves were released there in December 2023. In February 2025, Defenders of Wildlife reported that the number had risen to about 30. Ranchers have argued passionately that this means they’ll lose their livestock and livelihoods.

Not so, according to the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife (CPW). More wolves on the landscape is safer for livestock, says CPW’s director, Jeff Davis. In a September 2024 press conference, Davis explained that a greater number wolves lets them form packs, each of which identifies a home territory. As described above, a pack must then vigorously and continuously defend its chosen area against rival packs in order to preserve access to the natural prey available there, such as elk. As a result, a pack’s behavior is more predictable and easier for CPW to anticipate and manage than a solitary wolf wandering the landscape looking for a meal.

To help livestock owners fend off any and all predators, CPW offers public information sessions and helpful instruction on removing or burying carcasses of livestock that died for any reason, including illness, and would attract predators if left on the land. Its website shows owners how to apply for compensation for losses.

When the adult male of one particular pack began attacking livestock, CPW rounded up the group and took it into captivity. The male’s repeated raids qualified as “chronic” depredation. Legally, lethal means could have been used to stop him. However, he was given a reprieve—life in captivity rather than a death sentence.

In the September press conference, Davis explained that there were unique factors to consider, including that his female partner had just given birth. “We had the adult male trying to supplement food to the female while she was in the den,” Davis said. “Lethal management at that point would have put her health in jeopardy and likely led to the mortality of the pups. This would have been counter to the restoration component of the law.”

When CPW staff took the pack into captivity—in August and early September 2024, according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel—they found only four of the pack’s five pups. The approach of winter made searching for the fifth pup increasingly difficult, so they abandoned him. The assumption was that he would survive on rabbits and other small animals, reports the Daily Sentinel.

This past summer, young lambs were killed in several incidents, with bite marks indicating a wolf. This qualified as chronic depredation; further, the lambs’ owner had already tried non-lethal means to frighten away predators. Lethal means were legal.

Subsequently, a wolf was heard howling. According to a 2025 CPW report, “Division and Wildlife Services staff then used thermal optics to locate the wolf. Wildlife Services staff shot the wolf once with a .25-06 rifle. Division and Wildlife Services staff immediately searched for the wolf, but were unable to locate it.”

Even using dogs to track the maimed animal’s trail of blood, the shooters did not find him, dead or alive, says the report. They were able to collect bone fragments, blood and tissue. Genetic testing on these traces revealed that the wolf was related to the captured pack, so likely the abandoned pup.

He had been apparently trying to keep himself alive with prey he could handle on his own—without a functional family pack to support him.

Star turn in Yellowstone

In Yellowstone National Park, wolves demonstrated their power to transform and maintain the environment. By the 1920s, extermination had rendered the park wolf-free. The population of elk, their favorite meal, boomed. The enlarged herds decimated the park’s foliage, which in turn wiped out creatures that had relied on now-destroyed ecological niches. Riverbanks eroded and collapsed. Invasive grasses took hold.

Restoring wolves to the park in 1995 reestablished balance, according to a 2025 study in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation. Data collected from 2001 to 2020 shows that as wolves controlled the elk population, trees regrew and birds returned. Beavers had material for dams, providing niches for otters, fish, reptiles and more. Eagles, vultures and other scavengers feasted on carcasses the wolves left behind.

Elk behavior changed. At ease when there were no wolves, they became wary. They avoided river valleys, where hungry wolves might spot them in the open. Less elk traffic meant riverbanks stabilized. Regrown forests further reinforced the banks. Rivers meandered less.

Wolves had transformed not just the fauna and flora of Yellowstone, but its physical landscape.

Disaster … or paradise?

In 2012, a well-funded local campaign trumpeted a different story: “the greatest wildlife disaster in the history of North Carolina.” The cause? The state’s few red wolves, 120 in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, were eating deer and other game that should be reserved for humans. Encouraged by the campaign, hunters shot red wolves with zeal, Sutherland says. The population was down to 7 in 2020.

To test the claim that red wolves had devastated the environment, Sutherland set up 20 trailcams in the refuge and posted the images online. In just one day, one trailcam recorded an abundance of deer, black bears, red wolves, bobcats and much more. Sutherland also observed that the increasingly rare Northern bobwhite quail, avidly sought by birdwatchers and hunters alike, thrives in areas of denser red-wolf habitation. Like the wolves at Yellowstone, red wolves help balance the ecosystem—eating the raccoons that raid the eggs of the ground-nesting quail.

Red wolf territory offers “one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in eastern North America,” Sutherland says. He calls it “a wildlife paradise.” (To see the trailcam images, viewed over one million times, go to this link and click on “Start Here.” For more, watch the video, Red Wolves’ Last Stronghold.)

In addition to sustaining the environment, wolves create positive outcomes for humans. The advocacy group Project Coyote reports that wolves reduce deer-vehicle collisions, mainly by causing deer to avoid open spaces like roads, where wolves might spot them. With recovered wolf populations also scaring deer off roads in Europe, countries there notice this as well, the European Commission reported in 2023.

This year, 30 red wolves inhabit the Alligator River refuge, thanks to numerous pups fathered in 2022 and 2023 by a male sent to the refuge in 2021 from a Florida sanctuary. A vehicle killed that male in September 2023. Another male that arrived in 2021—from the Wolf Conservation Center—died in a road accident within a week of getting to Alligator River.

Roadways are a major killer of red wolves, confirms the North Carolina Department of Transportation. To support the agency’s plans to construct safe road crossings for wolves and other wildlife, Sutherland and a team are tallying vertebrates killed on highways traversing the Alligator River refuge. In one year, they’ve found 5,044 deer, bears, otters, mink, songbirds and more lying mangled on the roadsides—144 species in all.

Coping with tragedy is part of consequential involvement with wolves, according to Collins. But the work is about recovery of a species, she says. “We have to focus on all the good we do … even when it gets really hard.”

Night falls over the Wolf Conservation Center. As we depart, we glimpse wolves cuddling up in grassy hollows or in gaps between boulders. We hear glissandos, quiet barks and throaty growls.

“Every visitor leaves here loving wolves,” Downey says. She and other staffers enjoy telling people, “Act like a wolf.”

Stephanie WoodardMore by this author →

Stephanie Woodard is an award-winning journalist who writes on human rights and culture with a focus on Native American issues. She is the author of American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion.