The Wolf Society of Great Britain's Newsletter will appear here, and be regularly updated. You can receive a copy of the full version by joining us and helping wolf conservation around the world. An early project supported by The Wolf Society of Great Britain was an ongoing study of the Indian wolf by Dr Yadvendradev Jhala, a biologist from the Wildlife Institute of India. Dr Jhala has kindly provided progress and technical reports based on the findings of his team, which form the basis of the following article. The Indian wolf , Canis lupus pallipes , is a small sandy coloured subspecies of the grey wolf Canis lupus , found in India and southern Asia.
Males are usually around fifteen per cent larger than females.
The Indian wolf has not been extensively studied, but numbers are estimated to be around 1,500 in peninsular India itself, with numbers believed to be decreasing. Wolf presence in northern and eastern regions remains uncertain. Wolves in India tend to prefer open habitat, usually scrubland, avoiding forested areas. This is possibly an adaptation to avoid competition with big cats such as tigers and leopards, and the Asian wild dog or dhole, although wolf populations do sometimes overlap leopard territories. Wolves may have initially arrived in India from the arid areas of the Middle East and naturally colonised open habitat rather than the moister forests.