Man’s First Best Friend

Humans have never had a neutral relationship to this animal, say David Mech and Luigi Boitani, preeminent wolf experts and editors of Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (University of Chicago Press, 2003). In the United States, it behooves us to examine our beliefs about and dealings with wolves—positive and negative—and see how similar thoughts and actions have played out internationally. Though some Americans fear or hate wolves, at other times and in other places around the globe, humans have revered them as deities, protectors, teachers and kin.

The Roman Empire’s origin story recounts Lupa, a female wolf, caring for orphaned baby Romulus, who grew up to found Rome. Anishinaabe tribal nations in North America say humans and wolves were created as siblings and sent to travel the earth together and name its plants, animals and natural features. In Japan, where they are celebrated with mountain shrines, the components of the word for wolf, okami, allude to a great and mysterious power.

As the wolf population grew in Italy and surrounding areas, independent efforts to fit them with radio collars allowed researchers—and the press—to follow them. In 2012, an Italian female wolf nicknamed Giulietta set out to look for a mate. She crossed more than 750 miles of Italy’s glorious countryside, finally finding him in the rugged mountains north of Verona.

Her suitor, dubbed Slavc, had arrived in northeastern Italy after an even more arduous journey—climbing mountain ranges, swimming major rivers and crossing highways as he trekked 1,200 miles from his origins in Slovenia. “Two lovers from different families who met in Verona,” Giunti says. “She could only be called Juliet, after Shakespeare’s Juliet and Romeo!”

The pair had two pups in 2013 and seven in 2014—to breathless reports in European media. Over the next decade, they were thought to have had at least 40 pups. In uniting two small hitherto isolated wolf populations, they increased genetic diversity for their offspring, and by extension, for Europe’s wolves.

The Italian gray wolf, or Canis lupus italicus, had its revival in Italy after World War II. It is a subset of the primary species, the gray wolf, or Canis lupus, found in much of the Northern hemisphere, with fur that is often gray but can range from white through black. As post-war Italian economic development drew people from the countryside into urban areas, forests regrew, creating habitat and supporting prey suitable for wolves, says Giunti.

Hidden away in remote portions of the Apennine mountains, in the middle of the Italian peninsula, a remnant population of Italy’s wolves had survived extermination. During the late 20th century, they took advantage of the nation’s newly wolf-friendly landscape. They began dispersing once more, a natural process by which young wolves, like Giulietta, leave their natal pack to seek a mate.

This wasn’t a government program. Italian gray wolves did this in their own way and on their own time. Giunti points out that wolves, at the top of the food chain, maintain a balance among other animal populations. As a result, the wolves ensured the health of Italy’s changing landscape as they repopulated it.

Humans followed their lead. Starting in 1971, wolves’ resurgence inspired protection campaigns and laws, in Italy and throughout Europe. The continent now has some 20,000 gray wolves, which arose from numerous countries’ remnant populations, not just that in the Apennines. In recent years, multinational efforts like the five-year LIFE WolfAlps EU contributed to what it called “actions to improve wolf-human coexistence.” From 2019 to 2024, the group offered educational events and information for livestock owners, journalists, schoolchildren and the general public.

However, such activities have not guaranteed ongoing protection for wolves. The European Union recently downgraded them from “strictly protected” to merely “protected.” This will allow occasional culls—though a few European countries have national laws prohibiting that. This includes Italy, where wolves remain fully protected, and harming one, or any animal, is a serious offense.

First besties

Rewind as many as 5,000 years, when humans and wolves lived together in a cave on Stora Karlsö, a tiny island in the Baltic Sea. A 2025 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) gives us a glimpse at what was going on during this long-ago fellowship.

The cave is small, about 70 feet by 15 feet, so the two groups would have lived and interacted at close quarters. Researchers analyzed bones they found in the cave and determined that we were all enjoying the same diet—mainly fish and seals. Healed damage to a wolf’s leg bone implies that it was cared for during a period when it wouldn’t have been able to hunt for itself, or perhaps even walk.

“Completely unexpected” is how a lead researcher, Linus Girdland-Flink, lecturer in Biomolecular Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, has described discoveries on Stora Karlsö, now a part of Sweden. “This paints a complex picture of the relationship between humans and wolves in the past.”

Wolves were the first animals and the only large carnivore to live in close proximity to humans. No one knows when this association arose, but it appears to have been established for tens of thousands of years by the time the two species arrived on Stora Karlsö. The island’s isolation and the fact that it was never connected to mainland Scandinavia imply that wolves were introduced there by humans traveling to the island by boat, write the authors.

The human-wolf affiliation on the tiny island is not unprecedented. Across Eurasia, “wolves appear to have been incorporated into prehistoric human societies, not merely as wild fauna, but as animals with symbolic, ritual, and possibly practical meaning,” write Girdland-Flink and his fellow authors in the PNAS paper.

Most scientists suggest two pathways for the early human-wolf fellowship: Either humans hand-raised wolf pups chosen during the first weeks of life, when they respond easily to taming, or wolves domesticated themselves, showing up at our ancient home sites and behaving compliantly in return for leftover food.

There might be a third possibility, involving humans carefully studying wolves, speculates Girdland-Flink. “Wolves are thoughtful, they plan, they consider their next move. They adapt continuously via decision-making,” he says. “How would humans adapt to new environments? Observing wolves would be beneficial.”

This ground-breaking suggestion is supported by the many similarities between humans and wolves, despite the obvious differences. Both are social predators, bringing back the catch to feed the family, or pack. They have similar social structures, with related individuals banded together in a group typically headed by one male and one female. This pair are parents of succeeding generations and stay together lifelong and year-round, not just during a mating season.

The likenesses go on. Wolf and human parents care for their young until they mature, using family members as babysitters. This trail cam video shows a juvenile wolf at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York, minding younger siblings. (You, dear reader, may remember being similarly pressed into babysitting duties!) When both species’ young mature, they disperse to find mates and establish their own families.

Individuals in each species may be hunters but are also omnivores. The fish and seals eaten by the wolves on Stora Karlsö were likely provided by the humans there, according to the PNAS paper; wolves also eat fruit and other vegetable matter, as available. In this trail cam video from the Voyageur Wolf Project, in Minnesota, you can see wolves gobbling blueberries.

While we were watching wolves, they were watching us. Retired Pennsylvania State University anthropology professor Pat Shipman has pointed to research describing wolves as spatial learners that use observation to solve problems. They might, the research suggests, watch a human accomplish a task like unlatching a gate, then do it themselves.

The years of interaction and mutual observation may have inspired the innumerable legends worldwide of wolves guiding humans and caring for human children, conjectures Girdland-Flink. “The myths may have some hint of truth about them, reflecting cultural memories of long-term human-wolf relationships that are not clearly visible in the archaeological record.”

Crisis management

In Japanese tradition, wolves are linked to the solitary nobility of heroes. Legends portray them as guides leading the brave along the righteous path, says Narumi Nambu, co-founder of the Japanese advocacy organization Wolf and Forest and a translator of highly considered books about wolves. In 2018, the International Wolf Center in Minneapolis awarded her its premier honor, Who Speaks for the Wolf.

Wolves, according to Nambu, were also legendary guardians of ordinary people. “When [they] summoned up their courage to traverse dark mountain paths at night, Japanese wolves would quietly watch over them,” she says. “They protected the traveler from unseen monsters, safely delivering them to their destination before vanishing. Later, the traveler offered the gentle animal a rice ball as a token of gratitude.”

Despite wolves’ cultural importance, they have been extinct in Japan since the early 20th century, victims of a national rush to modernization and the aggressive exploitation of forests and agricultural land needed to support that. At one point, Nambu says, “The Japanese government invited American livestock experts, who introduced techniques for wolf eradication.” With wolves exterminated, voracious deer populations exploded, along with destruction of the very resources needed for modernization.

As a result of these reckless practices, the Japanese ecosystem is broken, according to Nambu. “Many of Japan’s national parks are on the brink of crisis due to deer browsing damage,” she says, adding that the environment cries out for a top predator—the wolf—to restore it.  

The 1995 reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, in Wyoming, a century after extermination there, famously validates this position, as Barn Raiser has reported. An article in Animal Conservation, a publication of the Zoological Society of London, describes the positive impact of red wolves (Canis rufus) on the Alligator River Natural Wildlife Refuge, in North Carolina. And, as we learned above, Italian gray wolves’ late-20th-century comeback ensured the health of Italy’s changing landscape.

Public interest in re-introducing wolves to Japan is undermined by government indifference to the idea, Nambu says. At the same time, the government is eager to rid the country of its many millions of destructive deer.

Since hunting has lost its popularity among younger Japanese, the government has pinned its hopes on elderly hunters motivated by a sense of civic duty. It expects the oldsters to shoot tens of thousands of deer each year. The government recently gave them a modest target for deer population reduction—half gone over 10 years—then had to revise the goal downward. Nambu calls the endeavor “impossible.”

“We at Wolf and Forest persistently continue our appeals and keep disseminating accurate wolf knowledge to the general public,” Nambu says.

American crazy quilt

Wolves may have proved their worth at Yellowstone and Alligator River, but they nevertheless have an erratic patchwork of support in the United States. On one hand, sanctuaries and zoos around the country have formed coalitions that propagate wolves under the aegis of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)—storing individual wolves’ DNA in a database, pairing breeding adults to maximize genetic diversity and releasing pups, grown wolves and packs into the wild. FWS and its partners bring Mexican gray wolves (Canis lupus baileyi) to remote areas of New Mexico and Arizona, red wolves to Alligator River and gray wolves to several western states.

Some US states have long-standing wolf populations. Primary among them is Alaska, with as many as 11,000, according to the International Wolf Center. Wolves have found their way into several states, including California. These days, it has 10 packs in mostly rural northern areas, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. In February 2026, a young female turned up in Los Angeles County—the first wolf seen in the environs of Tinseltown in more than a century. She was looking for a mate but did not find one, according to the department. Her radio collar shows that she has moved on to continue her quest.

On the other hand, Americans indulge in plenty of trash talk about wolves. Politicians and lobbyists claim loudly, erroneously and repeatedly that wolves kill lots of livestock, threatening ranchers’ livelihoods. Such claims fall far short of the evidence. U.S. Department of Agriculture figures reveal that wolves attack a minuscule number of livestock—9 thousandths of one percent of cattle lost in a given year, for example. The rest succumb to causes like sickness, old age and extreme weather, which inspire no condemnations whatsoever. In any case, Congress has appropriated money to compensate livestock owners who can prove their losses were due to predation.

Untroubled by truth, the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to delist, that is remove, wolves from protections of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. This is despite a recent poll showing that nearly 80% of Americans favor safeguarding wolves. The bill awaits action in the Senate, where similar bills have failed in the past.

“Some folks need to maintain [wolves] as scapegoats and bludgeons, to keep people in line and angry,” says Ron Sutherland, chief scientist for Wildlands Network, a continent-wide conservation group, and an author of the Animal Conservation article mentioned above. Wolves must be disentangled from American politics, he says.

Sutherland spoke to Barn Raiser after a January 2026 trip to the Alligator River refuge. Its red wolves are the world’s most endangered wolf and the only purely North American example of the species. The estimated wild population is now just under 30.

This number, though small, is in fact good news. In 2020, red wolves numbered just seven. This was due to ruthless killing by hunters urged on by a local misinformation campaign that declared that the few deer eaten by red wolves were really meant for us humans. (To read Barn Raiser’s report on this, click here and search for “Disaster … or paradise?”)

Sutherland hopes for a good crop of pups this coming April and May. The best-case scenario, he says, would be 20 to 30. Their numbers will likely be bolstered by several captive-born pups and adult wolves sent to the refuge from sanctuaries and zoos around the country.

Red wolves have influential supporters. The Tuscarora Nation, an Indigenous nation in North Carolina, participates in Save Red Wolves, a coalition that includes the major conservation groups Center for Biological Diversity and Wildlands Network. The Tuscaroras have named individual red wolves at Alligator River. (Click here to listen to 20 Tuscarora names and their English-language translations, from He Makes the Path through Mother of the Nation and Father of the Clan. For more about the adventurous and charismatic She Blazes the Path, click here.)

One of Sutherland’s primary efforts during his recent trip to Alligator River was continuing his enumeration of the thousands of animals of many species run down each year on the refuge’s roadways. This information supports the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s goal of building protective wildlife crossings—over and under the roads.

It’s a lifesaving idea for us as well as for wolves and other wild animals. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, constructing numerous wildlife crossings nationally would help prevent the hundreds of fatalities and hundreds of thousands of injuries that occur each year to people involved in vehicle–animal collisions. The crossings would also save billions of dollars in related costs.

Rocky Mountain low

Safeguarding wolves is problematic in the northern Rocky Mountain states, where the Endangered Species Act does not cover them. In 2011, former Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) helped create this protection gap in an effort to appeal to Montana voters and save his Senate seat.

The attitude endures in the region. In 2021, Montana’s governor told multiple media outlets he was “honored” to have shot a collared Yellowstone wolf caught in a trap he had set. Though controversy arose over how long it had suffered in the trap before the governor got around to killing it, he announced he would do it all again.

In March 2026, in nearby Wyoming, a snowmobiler pled guilty to felony animal-cruelty charges and apologized for his actions. According to a local radio report in 2024, he had run down a young wolf, a practice known locally as “wolf whacking.” He then taped its muzzle shut, brought it to a bar and posed for photos while taunting the maimed, barely conscious animal. After several hours of this, he took the wolf behind the saloon and shot it.

The initial radio report on the incident fueled innumerable follow-up articles and an international outcry. In 2025, a U.S. House representative introduced a bill that would prohibit using a vehicle to kill, harass or injure wolves and other wildlife. The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.

Taylor’s mission

Last year, an intrepid Mexican gray wolf kept returning to Mount Taylor in northern New Mexico. This was despite state wildlife officials repeatedly capturing him and transporting him 150 miles away to the Gila National Forest, in the southern part of the state. Henceforth, the officials had decided, that southern forest would be the home of the three-year-old wolf, popularly known as Taylor.

Boundaries and rules confound wolves. They cannot possibly understand that trotting across an invisible line or ignoring an unimaginable decree is a matter of life and death. Determined to establish his own family on the mountain, Taylor ran back to it multiple times. On each journey, he successfully crossed I-40, a busy trucking route that bisects New Mexico from east to west—until he was struck and killed in January 2026.

Taylor’s death was lamented nationwide, with many calling for widespread construction of wildlife crossings, like those planned for Alligator River. Michelle Lute, executive director of Wildlife for All, has said that Taylor was doing exactly what a wolf is born to do: “What lags behind is our infrastructure and policy.”  

Humans are today the greatest cause of mortality for our ancient companion. We kill wolves for reasons ranging from legally sanctioned to perverse, from accidental to purposeful. Large predators may well be demonized and hunted down for simply existing, says Heather Tuttle, executive director of the Ohio Wildlife Center, a multi-species sanctuary in Powell, Ohio.

Wolves’ importance to a healthy environment for all creatures is misunderstood or ignored, according to Tuttle. Says Nambu, recognizing the value of wolves is about choosing the world we wish to inhabit.

To contact your Representatives, Senators or the White House about the wolf-oriented bills mentioned in this article, click here, here or here, respectively. The bills include H.R. 845, to remove protection from all gray wolves in the Lower 48 states;  H.R. 4255 to delist specifically the Mexican gray wolf; and H.R. 6864 to prevent “wolf whacking” and similar actions.

The author thanks Luciano Chessa for information on the comeback of Italian wolves, which inspired this article.

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.