After pups are born, the father stays home and helps raise them, often with the help of other members of the pack, Wuerthner said. The dominant animals in a wolf pack, the so-called alpha male and alpha female, frequently do all the breeding, an expedient they accomplish by forcefully preventing less dominant, or beta, wolves from breeding, or by killing the pups of beta wolves. Because most wolves grow to adulthood eating ungulates such as deer and elk, they tend to prefer them over domestic livestock, say biologists. They will, however, kill cattle and sheep. Observations in the 1970s determined that when wolves attack deer, elk and domestic livestock, they typically target the hindquarters, shoulders, flanks, nose and tail.
Wolves prefer to feed on viscera and hind limbs, say biologists.
When a pack of wolves pulls down an animal, the entire carcass often is quickly consumed. Countless Hollywood wilderness epics to the contrary, no documented record exists of a healthy, full-blooded adult wolf in the wilds of North America attacking a human being. Wuerthner thinks wolves may have acquired their dangerous reputation in Europe during the Middle Ages, when wolves were seen feeding off the bodies of victims of the Black Plague. An archive of Oregonian stories related to environmental concerns, ranging from salmon protection and federal logging legislature to urban growth and water quality control.