Beggar Wolves

Wildlife

When protected in a park setting, wolves occasionally become tame enough to hang around campgrounds or fishing docks searching for easy meals. On very rare occasions, they have bitten people, according to wolf experts.

Could the wolves poised for release in Yellowstone - the first wolves to roam the park in 60 years - become junk food junkies?

“Our wolves here are usually very, very shy,” said Dan Strickland, chief naturalist for Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. Few visitors even see them in the thickly wooded park, he added. “I’m aware of four cases in my 25 years in this park.”

Yellowstone wolf recovery project leader Mike Phillips said gray wolves becoming habituated to people in the park is possible but unlikely.

“I think it’s going to be a nonissue,” he said, stressing that wolves almost always do everything they can to stay away from people.

“Visitor safety is a concern,” he added. “But visitors have to behave intelligently.”

Feeding wolves, as with other animals, will be strictly forbidden in the park.

At Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, at least two wolves have become habituated to human food, mostly garbage and fish guts, according to Michigan Technical University wildlife ecology professor Rolf Peterson, who has studied wolves in that park.

Both of those wolves were old and starving, Peterson said. One had learned that when a boat docks, a meal of fish guts often came with it.

Peterson said nobody has been killed or significantly injured by a healthy wolf in North America.

“The bottom line is wolves aren’t dangerous,” Peterson said. “Every other large carnivore occasionally kills people. But not the wolf.”