The Danger of Wolves to Humans
Mikhail P. Pavlov. 1982. Appendix-A, Chapter 12, “The Danger of Wolves to Humans” (pp 136-169) IN The Wolf in Game Management. First edition 1982, 2nd edition 1990, Agropromizdat, Moscow. (Translated from Russian by Valentina and Leonid Baskin, and Patrick Valkenburg. Edited by Patrick Valkenburg and Mark McNay)
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Cases of severe unprovoked aggression by wolves toward humans are numerous, so we touch upon a very dramatic subject. Society needs more complete information on the problem to evaluate the true danger of predatory wolves and take precautions. There are tendencies, even among scientists, to believe that aggression by wolves toward humans is quite rare (138). To overcome this, it is necessary to describe some horrible, heart-stopping details of this aggression in Russia, just for the sake of further safety. This is the only way to persuade people how threatening wolves (i.e. anthropophagy) can be. The greatest danger is posed by rabid wolves in settlements and villages. Each rise in the wolf population results in increasing aggression, mostly by rabid animals.
According to N.V. Turkin, in 1870 an explosion of wolves led to numerous cases of humans being bitten by rabid wolves, though only a few of these cases became the subjects of newspaper articles (210: 77). To prove his statement, the above-mentioned author referred to 38 newspaper articles on rabid wolves in various regions of Russia.
Today, even hunters are not well versed in the statistics of wolf rabies. Only the most notorious cases have become known. Thus, in the book “In a native land”, 1952, issue 2, P.V. Plesskiy mentioned that in 1924 in the town of Kirov (then Viatka) two rabid wolves bit about 20 people during one night. Ten of these people died. In documents from the Kirov Game Management Department I found information that in spring 1954 a rabid wolf in Urzhumskiy district bit 3 people and then was killed. …
Later, … P.A. Manteifel regarded as tales and fantasies all rumors about wolves attacking humans. As thorough a researcher of wild animals as he was, he could not accept the very idea of aggression of a normal (non-rabid) wolf towards a human. It was his principle to trust to personally proven facts only. Like many other scientists, Manteifel was sure that through long experience with humans, the wolf has developed an instinctual fear of humans that forbids it to even approach a human.
Manteifel’s idea was so firmly implanted in his numerous apprentices that it would probably still be popular today if it had not been for the events of World War II. These events caused most people to change their general attitude of good will towards the wolf. As a consequence of wolf-human interactions during wartime, a special commission was established, not very widely known then, under the supervision of the technical-scientific council of the Hunting Department in the Russian Federation. Facts about man-eating wolves led to steps intended to increase defenses against wolves. P. A. Manteifel headed the commission, and it’s conclusions and recommendations were presented in a report in November 1947. …
According to the conclusions of the report, sometimes, man-eating wolves proved to be wounded, or weak due diseases, but sometimes the animals were quite “normal”. The document recorded some specific cases of wolf attacks on children and women: 1920, Voronezhskiy district, Roman forestry area, an attack on a woman; 1935, Kuibishevskaya Oblast, villages of Kochetovka and Kanemenki, attacks on two children; 1935, Minsk Oblast, near the settlements of Kozli and Zachastse, attacks on two children; 1936, Minsk Oblast, Lyubanskiy district, attack on a child; 1937, in the same district, more than 16 children were bitten by a wolf; in 1940, in Domanovichskiy district of Minsk Oblast, more than eight children and some women; 1945 in Georgia, in Akhalkalakskiy and Bogranovskiy districts, some children were attacked; 1945 in the settlement of Dagestan, some children attacked; 1946, Voronezh Oblast, Polenovskiy district, a child was attacked; at the railway station at Bologoye, two children were stolen by wolves from a house; 1946 in Kaluzhsk Oblast, Ludinovskiy district, 10 children were attacked; and in 1947 in Kirovskiy Oblast, 27 children were attacked. The document stated that most of the children were torn to pieces.
Unfortunately, problems with man-eating wolves attracted little attention at the time and did not become the subject of special study. Whoever got reliable information regarded the cases as exceptional and explained them mostly as the result of war and/or the abundance of dead bodies that were not properly buried. The idea prevailed that only exceptional animals (i.e. ill or old ones or wolves that had been tamed and then liberated at war time) dared to attack humans. A ban was imposed by authorities on the publication of cases of wolves attacking humans, so facts were kept secret and could not be checked thoroughly. …
The tendency to diminish the threat was supported by results of work on wolf-human interactions in America. D. Mech, D. Pimlott, and R. Peterson unanimously decided that in North America wolves never show aggression towards humans and do not pose a threat at all. They reported only one wolf attack on a human (Peterson, 1947), and according to Pimlott, the animal was probably rabid. Also, in the paper by Daniel Dubois entitled “We are not afraid of the gray wolf” and published in the “Courier” magazine in March 1988, the author regarded fear of wolves as a psychopathic mania. He stated:
… no, as soon as these mystic carnivores are mentioned, stories appeared on horrible, bloodsucking, cannibalistic animals, stories which were as popular in medieval evenings by the fire as in sensation-driven newspapers of nowadays, supported either by the public or by officials. We now can understand wolf behavior, so no horror should exist anymore when we mention “wolf”.
These opinions could easily disorient society, and make people tend to ignore the stories of man-eating wolves in the Russian past. Thus, I regard it as my duty to report the most typical cases of wolves’ aggression towards humans. …
In Kirovskiy Oblast, wolf attacks on humans have been recorded since 1944. In the first cases, a procurator was told that there were plenty of wolves, and people, even adults, were threatened. At the end of September near the settlement of Buracovskii a wolf caught an 18-month old child and carried it towards the forest. Peasants saved the child. A few days later, in the collective farm “The Giant” in Mendeleevskiy locality, two wolves attacked a girl, who watched a horse in a meadow. The animals bit the girl and tore her clothes. After its first attempts, the wolf started chasing children systematically. On 6 November, on the road to the collective farm “New Village” in Alexandrovsk locality, in daylight, wolves tore an 8-year old girl (Perfilova) to pieces, and left behind only pieces of her clothes. On 12 November in a settlement Beretzovskiy at 11 a.m. nine wolves bit to death a young postwoman (Tamara Musinova, age 14), who carried letters to villages. On 19 November in a forest clearing of Ramenskiy locality Maria Polakova (age 16), who was returning to work with her sister, was bitten to death. …
From 1946 to 1950, man-eating wolves were an extremely severe threat in some districts of Kirovskaya Oblast, namely Darovskiy, Lebiazhskiy, Sovetskiy, Nolinskiy, Khalturinskiy and Orichevskiy districts. In Darovskiy district in July-August 1948, wolves took 9 children aged 7-12 years. In July and August 1950, a boy and 3 girls aged 3-6 became victims of wolves in Lebiazhskiy district. …
In 1988, the editorial board of the magazine “Hunting and Hunting Economics” sent me information on aggressive wolves in Kaluzhskaya Oblast. Ex-chairman of the hunter’s society, S. Semiletkin, informed the magazine that in 1943-1947 there were 60 victims of wolf aggression, including 46 children. …
So there seem to be particular animals among wolf populations, some of which become successful and experienced at attacking large prey like moose and wild boar, and accidentally, humans. Wolves then can be expected to progress in specialization, sometimes solo, sometimes as a team. Each man-eater has appeared under particular circumstances. One of the favorable conditions seems to be a sharp increase in wolf numbers, so that the number of daring, aggressive, wolves also increases proportionally. …
During the war, active hunting of wolves stopped because adult hunters were sent to front, while older people worked on war enterprises. So at that time, wolves felt no fear of humans. Loss of fear was the trigger that unleashed aggressive behavior. The first successful attack on a person gave the animals confidence that humans were easy and safe prey. As some wolves deliberately chased and attacked humans, the experience spread among wolf population. All these factors favored the rapid rise of wolf-human aggression in Kirovskaya Oblast. If hunting managers had reacted immediately by killing problem animals, the tragedy might be have been avoided. Part of problem might have been attributable to wildlife scientists who tried to convince many chief game managers that wolves were not dangerous. …
We need to explain why man-eating appeared mostly in Kirovskaya Oblast and only rarely in other localities. The phenomenon the sharp decreases in game and increasing wolf numbers around villages were the same throughout the country during the World War II years. Nevertheless, in tundra or steppe regions there were no records on wolves killing humans. Also, D. Mech studied wolves of the King Islands?? in North America and concluded that the forest wolf of North America is not dangerous to humans at all (94:6).
So we again have to pay attention to statistics used by some game managers who denied the very idea of man-eating wolves. According to Turkin (210), wolves were known to kill humans in only 3 of 63 Russian Oblasts (earlier called Gubernias). These were Viatskaya (later Kirovskaya), Tomskaya, and Samarskaya). In particular, in Viatskaya in 1896-1897, 205 people became victims of predation, while there were only 10 in Vologodskaya, 18 in Kostromskaya, 1 in Arkhangel’skaya and 9 in Yaroslavskaya.
Therefore, it is apparent that aggressive animals are much more common in some wolf populations than in others. Elevated aggression towards humans might be a consequence of poor fauna, poor foraging opportunities, or having the available food connected mostly with human activity. Where wolves occur in such places they are potentially dangerous for humans. If for some reason, wolf numbers increase under such circumstances, wolves can be particularly troublesome.
In a newspaper article (“Wolf invasion”, Izvestia #28, 1986), correspondent A. Akhmedzianov reported information from the state of Bikhar in East India, where wolves carry off children from the village streets and attack women and young people. Bikhar was the birthplace of the well-known story of Maugli. Recent news from Bikhar on four men killed by wolves in the village of Anderra caused Akhmedzianov to investigate. He received an answer from Forest Headquarters that during the last 4 years more than 100 people were killed and about the same number were badly wounded. Bikhar is one of the poorest states, is covered by thick jungle, and the Adivasi people who live there are mostly fishermen and woodcutters. There are also many slaves (economic slaves working off debts) among the human population and their shelters are primitive stick or clay huts. These people possess no weapons to protect themselves against wild predators. In lean years, invasions of wolves took place and the wolves lost their fear of humans. The wolves entered huts, stole babies from cradles, and carried off other children who served as babysitters.
There is also data on rabid wolves, and these facts are much less contested. In the 1970s, as wolf numbers increased, records of wolf aggression also increased. In 1976, news arrived from Penza about an epidemic of fox rabies that had soon spread to wolves. In 1975, three rabid wolves bit 5 humans. …
In 1975-1976 attacks of rabid wolves on humans were also recorded in Ulianovskaya Oblast (15 cases), Kaluzhskaya Oblast (7 cases), Orenburgskaya Oblast (6 cases), and Orlovskaya Oblast (4 cases).
In Gorkovskaya Oblast, during the 10 years from 1929 to 1939, 40 people who were bitten by a rabid wolf were treated in hospitals. In the same area, after a rise in numbers of wolves in 1978, some 24 attacks on humans were recorded. In the 1980s, there also were numerous stories in newspapers on battles between humans and rabid wolves. …
In July 1976, in 3 days a wolf bit 16 people in the Lubomil district of Volinskaya Oblast. All of these cases were attributed to rabid wolves. …
In Byelorussia from 1969 to 1978, more than 800 cases of animal rabies were recorded (81), one third among wild predators, mostly foxes (87%), wolves, raccoon dogs, and others. The peak of the epizootic occurred in 1976 when there were 127 cases reported in carnivores. At the time, the wolf population had also sharply increased. In 1978, the chief of Domestic Affairs of Vitebskaya Oblast, O. Baranovskiy, informed me that on 27 March 1978 10 people were bitten by a wolf and hospitalized in Lioznenskaya hospital. Further investigation determined that between 12:00 noon on 26 March and 7:00 am on 27 March in Sennenskiy, Lioznenskiy, and Orshanskiy districts, a wolf with signs of rabies bit 24 people. …
Wolf rabies was also recorded in Actyubinskaya Oblast, where wolves were extremely numerous. According to Garbuzov and Yanshin (35), between 1972 and 1978 there were at least 50 cases of wolf attacks on humans. The records included only people who sought medical help, so the true number of victims was probably much higher. …
In 1957 in Byelorussia, a rabid wolf moved swiftly and bit 25 people (9 were deeply traumatized), around 50 domestic animals, and an unknown number of wild animals over a period of a day and a half (133). In 1979, a rabid female wandered around in the Pruzhanskiy district of Brestskaya Oblast and in the Orshanskiy district of Vitebskaya Oblast. It bit 26 people in an 11-hour period (44). …
These wide-ranging biting sprees by wolves promote the rapid spread of rabies. If these outbreaks occur when the wolf population is also high, as in 1976, large areas can be involved. In 1976, the disease spread over the whole Volga Valley, the north Caucasus, the central black-soil region, and as far as some Oblasts in the Urals (Kurganskaya, Orenburgskaya, and Tcheliabinskaya), and Western Siberia (Novosibirskaya, Omskaya, and Altaiskiy Krai). …
Especially in these historical cases, it is difficult to determine if rabies was always involved. We can only guess now, as a diagnosis was proved in only 31.4% of the animals suspected of being rabid. Among wolves that attacked humans, 70-80% could be rabid (35). Thus in all areas where wolf aggression towards humans has been recorded, game officials should take more seriously any new information on wolf aggression, analyze each case thoroughly, and destroy any suspicious animal. …
People must be told that a wolf in a settlement is not to be treated like a domestic animal and it should not be welcomed or met unarmed. …
