It is commonly thought that wolves always live in packs with a rigid hierarchy with an “alpha male”, frequent challenges to dominance, etc. This is not a correct view of natural wolf behaviour.
Wolf society can vary considerably with some wolves living alone such as old animals or young animals finding a new territory. A wolf pack is more accurately described as a nuclear family, as it usually consists of a pair and their offspring.
A typical wolf pack is around eight individuals, although up to thirty-six wolves have been sighted in a pack, depending on many factors such as availability of food, and personalities of wolves within the pack.
Unlike the commonly held idea that subordinate wolves will challenge and displace the dominant ones, this behavior has never been observed at all in the wild, and is therefore likely to be merely a result of unrelated captive wolves being put together and being unable to disperse and find their own territories when they become mature at around two years old. In the wild, the fact that the parents are dominant over their offspring is no more significant in wolves than in any other species.
Wolf packs are territorial, and will sometimes fight to the death. Almost all wolf deaths occur very near the border of their territory, and are most commonly dominant animals, who will defend their territory most aggressively. Howling is the main method of keeping wolf packs separate.
From this behavior, it can be seen that the practice of putting unrelated wolves together in a very small area in captivity is very likely to lead to unusual behaviors such as fighting over leadership which is where the commonly-held false ideas of the social nature of wolf packs come from.
Wolves will tend to live with their parent’s pack for some of their adult lives, fulfilling important roles such as helping to care for new pups, and hunting. They are prevented from breeding by the actions of the senior pair and so will tend to leave the pack in order to reproduce by finding an unrelated member of the opposite sex and a territory to start their own pack.
Wolves will often kill a member of their own pack if they act very unusually, such as being severely sick or injured.
Wolves in Asia are usually less sociable than in the New world, and are more likely to live in pairs or as individuals who occasionally socialize.
See our Blog post Wolf Photos for a superb selection of great photos of wolves.
See Wikipedia “Wolf” page for more details.