Wolves Killing People
3b. Results
Results In A Nutshell
What did the Linnell Report find? The great majority of fatal attacks on humans were by rabid wolves. There were few fatal predatory attacks on humans and none in North America. No one was killed when wolves attacked defensively. Moreover, examining records of the last 50 years the researchers could only find cases of 17 people killed in Europe and Russia and none in North America.
1. Rabid Attacks
The great majority of attacks on people over the centuries, according to the Linnell Report, were by rabid wolves. There are two phases of rabies: a placid phase, in which the infected animal is lethargic, and a furious phase, during which the animal dashes about in a frenzy. It seems that wolves can undergo a particularly intense furious phase. Rabid wolves, with their strength and rapid rate of travel, can run several miles and bite anyone who happens to be in their path.
The Linnell Report speculates that the Gevaudan wolf was probably not rabid. None of the survivors of the Gevaudan attacks contracted rabies, as some would surely have had the beast been struck with the disease. Furthermore, many people were killed and eaten by the Gevaudan wolf, but rabid wolves do not eat their victims.
2. Predatory Attacks
The researchers uncovered a number of reports of predatory attacks in Europe, mainly on children and to a lesser extent on women. The largest number of records comes from pre-20th century France, Russia, Estonia and northern Italy.
Interestingly, the researchers discovered that predatory attacks in Europe in the 20th century are rare, despite better record keeping and easier access to records that technology brings. Moreover, as already mentioned above, they could find records of only 17 people killed by wolves in Europe and Russia in the last fifty years and no fatalities in North America.
Child Lifting: Whereas the number of predatory attacks in Europe has greatly abated in the last century, predatory attacks are reported sporadically in newspapers in India today. These attacks, on small children, are colloquially dubbed child lifting.
Child lifting can be traced back at least to the 19th century, but only in the last few years has it been investigated in the field by scientists. According to Rajpurohit (1999), wolves do not often attack children, but some attacks can be severe. In Bihar State sixty out of 80 children from 63 villages were attacked and killed by wolves from 1993 to 1995.
Another severe episode, reported by Jhala et al (1997), was when 76 small children from more than 50 villages in Uttar Pradesh, central north India, were attacked during seven months in 1996. Over fifty of the children died. The victims tended to be from the poorest class of people: over half had only a mother to care for them, and children outnumbered livestock, which by necessity were more highly valued and guarded than children.
In these situations many wolves are eliminated as a response to try to halt the killings.
North America: As mentioned above, the Linnell Report found no fatal predatory wolf attacks in North America. Indeed, millions of campers and day trippers in North America visit national parks where wolves live, are happy to return year after year, and no one has been killed by a non-rabid wolf. However, during the last century there have been a number of non-rabid wolf attacks in North America resulting in injuries to people. These are covered in the next section by the McNay Report.
3. Defensive Attacks
The researchers of the Report concluded that wolves do not often attack when provoked. When they do they tend to bite or nip without causing serious injury. Amazingly, even when people dig up cubs from a den, wolves seem incapable of defending them from human attack.
It is one of the puzzling mysteries about wolves why such a robust animal seems incapable of putting up a fight when people dig up their cubs. The researchers found many reports of shepherds or trappers simply killing cornered wolves with clubs or sticks, so confident that they are safe from retaliation.
© Wolf Trust 2004. All rights reserved.