As I have been watching videos of wolf interactions in captive settings (e.g., International Wolf Center, Wolf Conservation Center), I sometimes wonder why these captive individuals exhibit certain behaviours, e.g., behaviours of what appears to be food intolerance (while these individuals have often been born in conditions where food is regularly and sufficiently available).
Sometimes I wonder if the reasons behind these interactions are entirely different than it might appear to us (just like interactions at a human family table might not always be readily understandable to an observer who is an outsider to this family because these interactions communicate messages that are not limited to the specific situation and that can reflect much vaster environmental and social contexts).
Recently I watched this video (Wolf Conservation Centre Twitch camera recording by YouTube Channel wlav210) of a den/food related interaction between two red wolves Tyke and Lava (September 7, 2022) that are a couple brought together presumably in 2020.
In Sep 2022 (at the time of the recording), Lava (captive-born wolf) would have been 3 – 4 years old (I am not sure if she was born in 2019 or in 2018) while Tyke (also captive-born wolf) would have been 7 years old.
In the video, Lava brings a snack into the den where Tyke had been resting (possibly, sleeping but at the time of Lava’s arrival – awake and self-grooming).
Lava then proceeds to place the snack (as it appears to me) conspicuously close to Tyke and she begins guarding the snack (defensive behaviour).
Tyke, initially, is not greatly interested but as Lava escalates her resource-defense manifestations, Tyke becomes invested in the situation and he chases Lava out of the den.
However, Tyke is not hungry and he simply buries the snack.
Lava then returns to the den (exhibiting caution).
At first, she appears intent on settling down (at a distance from Tyke) and she makes a great show out of scraping the bedding material in order to prepare for sleeping.
She realizes that Tyke has buried the snack (perhaps at this point although I would assume she had been aware of it earlier) and she uncovers it.
Then Lava snatches the bone and flees out of the den while Tyke is watching, partly invested in the defense that is expected from him.
Tyke stands up to inspect the site where the bone had been buried but he does not follow Lava.
(It is also worth mentioning that Lava and Tyke have other aggressive/defensive denning/bedtime interactions and the den site is a location of high intensity exchanges.)
While this is a highly interesting couple that exhibits both a strong bond and a tendency to set boundaries and then to either breach them or to provoke the partner into breaching them, in this post, I would also like to focus on the impacts of captivity on their relationship.
In captive settings, there are the obvious factors affecting interactions such as lack of personal space, unclear structures of dominance in situations where parentage is not the base of the social unit, frequent exposure to, for example, sounds, smells and sights of conspecifics outside of the group etc.).
However, I believe that the relationships also change due to the lack of interactions with the external environment.
For example, these wolves do not really hunt together and their responsibilities regarding the raising of the pups are also limited (Lava gave birth to pups in 2022 but in this video the pair is alone which could suggest the pups were perhaps taken from the parents for nature conservation purposes because the red wolf population in the wild only reaches ca. 20 – 25 individuals and any red wolf pups born in captivity hold the potential of restoring this population).
Before I address the ‘idle time’ issue, I would also like to express concern for the wolf parents whose offspring is taken away from them, especially, in situations where all pups suddenly disappear.
I have a deep understanding of the reasons why this is being done.
Still, it might cause stress and confusion in the captive parents because they might attribute the disappearance (which probably occurs out of their sight due to possible conflict situation with defensive wolf mothers and fathers) to mortality.
These couples might decide that their pups died and they might not be able to understand what happened.
It is not known precisely how wolf couples respond to loss of pups in the wild but it is likely that they attempt to resolve the causes to pup mortality (particularly if the loss occurs year after year).
Such resolution might be found (if behaviour in other species serves as an indicator) with a change of den site, territorial adjustments (e.g., expanding territory or shifting it slightly) or re-evaluation of pair bond (compatibility).
In captive situations, the wolf couple cannot change the den site, nor they can adjust their territory or prey.
Thus, the only factor within their scope might be that of questioning themselves and their partnership that could bear toll in the relationship.
Some of the behaviours observed in wolf parents (and other captive, litter-producing couples) whose offspring have been removed from their family might be attributable to confusion and assessment of their own health status / effectivity or of the status / effectivity of their partner.
I do not wish to say that these couples seek a divorce.
Even in the wild, wolf pairs do not necessarily split up if pup production has been low in one year or even during several years.
However, in the wild, wolves have the ability to show initiative in ensuring better fortunes (the aforementioned changes in den sites, acquiring better hunting skills, expanding territory if they deem resources to have been insufficient) and they also can spend the time without pups engaging in other meaningful activities in which they can test themselves against their environment.
It is possible that in the wild such couples do not lose self-confidence and self-reliance due to loss of pups because they can prove themselves to be efficient at hunting, patrolling and other activities during the reproductively inactive period.
They can also observe their mate in these activities drawing conclusions on their fitness.
In captivity, wolves mainly only have each other and similar processes of evaluation might become played out in their social interactions.
We do not know how individual wolves chose their partners in the wild but perhaps their choice is also (at least sometimes) based on observations of their partner in activities that would be crucial in pup survival.
If the behaviour by partner (or their own behaviour) cannot be tested, such individuals might come up with novel approaches to assessing the fitness.
These assessments must also involve aggressive/defensive contexts because a good parent is also one that can kill prey and defend pups/territory/prey etc.
Therefore in order to carry out such assessments in captivity where the actual aggressive/defensive contexts are unavailable, wolves might direct these behaviours toward one another to provoke a response and to evaluate whether their partner (or they themselves) would be capable of ensuring these functions if situation arose where these behaviours were needed (and also because proficiency is partly genetic and partly learned which is why the parent must be proficient regardless of the actual need to apply the skills and traits because this is what the offspring will inherit and learn).
This could explain some of the heightened social aggression/dominance in captive wolf packs that are not constituted of related individuals.
Without the natural hierarchy due to parentage and without the natural context in which dominance is clearly proven through leadership, fitness during hunt/defense etc., individuals have to play out these scenarios in a rather arbitrary manner.
It could be compared to either:
- Assessing dominance under conditions where dominance is tested in everyday situations (hunt, territorial patrolling, defense, raising of pups etc.) and where it can be experienced as proficiency and leaderships in a very practical context on which survival depends;
- Assessing the potential of dominance under conditions where this potential is never truly effectuated but where dominance becomes a rather abstract (not truly practically applicable) role which has to be re-affirmed through role-playing.
(Under conditions where the setting is not captive but where the social group of wolves does not consist of parents and their offspring but rather of a large number of unrelated individuals, e.g., in release programmes, the dominance difficulties might stem from the lack of experience by the subordinates regarding the dominant wolves’ efficiency in parental position.
Perhaps pups learn of the fitness of their parents through experiencing the behaviour of parents in the parental context.
Without this experience, some piece in the puzzle regarding dominance might be missing and unrelated subordinates might be constantly doubting the fitness of their leaders despite having observed them raising pups of their own.
This could be compared to the respect (and also a certain ‘lack of respect’ that results in reduced tension in families) that children have for their parents vs. nannies or other caretakers and the respective authority-setting consequences).)
Returning to my previous statements, I believe that relationship dynamics become altered in captive situations because:
- Many natural activities are unavailable for captive wolves and they should try to compensate this deprivation through engaging in either similar activities (that might not appear similar to us but that might appear similar to wolves themselves) or in displacement activities (discovering new activities or extending/exaggerating the use of existing activities);
- The absence of many real-life tasks results in leisure time that must be occupied somehow and the most dynamic and challenging occupation is that of social bonding;
- The natural relationships have to be maintained but this could be difficult because some of the wilderness aspects to relationships are lacking and individuals might find themselves spending more time with one another (e.g., Lava and Tyke who would have been raising pups during autumn and winter), possibly – repeatedly (if this situation occurs year after year).
I do not believe that wolf couples and wolf families grow conflictual due to increased exposure to family members (at least not in the sense that is customary referred to in human relationships where sudden and prolonged proximity can lead to discovery of relationship aspects that are difficult to process).
Many of these individuals have been born in captivity and the change is not sudden to them.
However, there might be conditions that are not easy for captive wolves and perhaps these conditions even depend on the species/subspecies/ecotype of the wolf (i.e., wolves that come from populations where wolves have considerably smaller ranges and smaller pack size might adapt more quickly to limited space and privacy while wide-roaming and even migratory wolves might suffer more in the captive setting where it is not possible to separate from others fully or to regroup in smaller bands just to reunite at a later time).
Still, wolves are highly adaptive and their dispersal behaviour also indicates at a flexible ability to utilize diverse environmental layouts and group structures.
In fact, I believe that some of the conflict behaviour is not at all related to actual dissonance in the pair or group.
I think that it might be a development of novel interactions (based on natural behaviours but slightly expanded upon from those) that become added to behaviours observed in the wild in order to:
- introduce components into social interactions that mimick or replace natural behaviours (e.g., hunting, splitting into smaller groups, exploring etc.) which could or could not be socially based in the wild (the principle being that of introducing physical movements and psychological states into social interactions that would have otherwise been produced in different types of social or non-social situations);
- evolve relationships so that these relationships could become the most time and energy consuming aspect of daily life and so that they could reflect the qualities that wolves otherwise respect, value and wish to observe in one another in the wild setting where these qualities would become manifested during defense, provisioning etc.
For example, in the wild, wolf parents (and older siblings if present) would socialize the pups teaching them cooperative behaviour during hunting and during feeding on the kills.
It is possible that just like we enjoy observing our partners in their respective parental roles, wolves, too, enjoy these demonstrations of fatherhood/motherhood.
With the pups gone and without other activities available in which the individuals could perform parental roles (e.g., ensuring proper conditions for the future pups), Lava might have enticed Tyke to exert dominance which she would have otherwise observed as her partner would discipline pups, maintain group order or simply take charge in provisioning prey.
On the other hand, Lava might be performing some educational sequences she would otherwise extend toward pups.
For example, in the wild, adult wolves might actually teach pups to grow in confidence but also to recognize certain limits after which boldness becomes overboldness, dangerous to the individual.
Lava might have presented the snack to Tyke (who, in this context, would play the role of the pup) displaying readiness to defend it and ‘teaching Tyke’ to assess risk and to take chances according to risk assessment.
Lava and Tyke appear to have several den-related ‘dramas’ and as the den would be the site reminding Lava of pups, it is possible that at least some of these interactions have origins in her maternal needs.
Wolves do not typically den during autumn and denning with her mate in this season might be confusing for Lava who borne pups that very year and whose hormones are likely still set into pup-raising mode.
Some of the captive play interactions also lie somewhere on the edge between wrestling and chasing prey/surrendering as prey.
I have not observed interactions where individuals would perform typical prey-attacking behaviours (e.g., biting the throat) but it still seems to me that some of the play bouts might serve to mimick hunting behaviour where one (or several) wolves play the predator while one (or several) wolves play the part of the prey.
Food interactions in general might have become more complex not because of any real social tension but because wolves miss hunting and these interactions can replace some of the hunting behaviour.
As I have discussed in a previous post (On politeness and aggression), wild animals do not readily (and for good reasons) evolve new behaviours abandoning the old ones without first perfecting them.
It is conceivable that rather than developing novel ways to interact, captive wolves build on the existing range of behaviours adjusting these acts to be fitted within social interactions (although borrowed from other types of interactions, e.g., pup raising or hunting) and practising them with the purpose of skill/trait maintenance, learning as well as with the purpose of ensuring the psychological need to self-actualize and to come by appreciation of the abilities of other group members in their social roles.
Part of the aggressive/dominance interactions might not stem from limited space and other factors that lead to increased tension.
They might stem in the need of the wolves to express themselves creatively and to develop upon their range of social interactions including new exchanges that are founded upon old behaviours while adapted to become manifested in new contexts.
Notes by Ieva 