Natural History

It is often mentioned that the wolves have no natural predators.

This statement is not necessarily true.

Bears of various species will kill wolf pups, and sometimes, they will kill wolves over territorial disputes and access to carcasses.

Cougars and leopards have been known to take the odd wolf.

And wolves themselves do a lot of killing of each other.

But only one predator has been proven to kill wolves in sufficiently enough numbers to actually control wolf populations.

I am not talking about man in this case. However, our species has certainly done a number on wolves.

The predator that really goes after wolves is a big cat. Indeed, it is the biggest cat– the Amur or Siberian tiger.

In the Amur tiger’s main range in the Sikhote-Alin mountains, wolves were virtually unknown until dawn of the twentieth century. By that time, the main wave of Russian colonization had penetrated the mountain range.

As the big cats became rarer, the number of wolves increased.

Now, these cats obviously have a taste for canine food.  They have been known to prey on dholes, which once were common in Amur tiger range. The northern terminus of the dhole’s original range is well within the core of Amur tiger habitat.

But Amur tigers are best known for their attacks on dogs. Although they generally fear people, they have been known to go out of their way to attack dogs.

Canine meat is just too much for them to pass up.

In fact, there are plenty of stories of Amur tigers approaching armed hunters for no other reason other than to take the laika dogs walking at their sides.

It is very rare for an Amur tiger to become a maneater.

But their love of dog meat makes them approach human settlements.

That big cats prey on dogs isn’t such a strange thing.   There are many cougars who would rather hunt dogs than deer, and leopards really like to hunt dogs. In fact, when Europeans brought their large hunting dogs to Africa, the leopards had a field day.  A leopard typically isn’t much larger than a dog, and to a naive European dog, there is very little in its life experience that would have told it to find a cat dangerous.  Indeed, there would have been much in its life experience to find the cat fun to chase.

But the fact that Amur tigers are such a major predator of wolves is quite surprising. Wolves generally don’t experience much predation, unless you count the large numbers of wolves that are killed in intraspecies conflicts as predation.

In this part of the Russian Far East, the top dog’s status is supplanted by a  cat.

Granted, it is a massive cat.

But so long as there are Amur tigers in those forests, the wolves and dogs will have something to worry about.

Of course, those tigers aren’t exactly thriving– as one can easily see with virtually every tiger population.

The wolves and dogs are much more successful as a species.

It’s just in this part of Russia, they have real competition.