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Fear of the fabled "big bad wolf" has dominated the public perception of wolves for millennia and strongly influences current debates concerning human-wildlife conflict. Humans both fear wolves and, perhaps more importantly, are concerned about wolves losing their fear of humans—because if they fear us, they avoid us and that offers protection.

A new Western University study shows that even where laws are in place to protect them, wolves fully fear the human "super predator."

These findings by Western biology professor Liana Zanette—in collaboration with one of Europe's leading wolf experts, Dries Kuijper from the Polish Academy of Sciences, and others—are published in Current Biology.

Zanette and her colleagues conducted an unprecedented experiment across a vast 1,100 sq. km area in north-central Poland, demonstrating that wolves fully retain their fear of humans, even where laws exist to protect them.

To conduct their experiment, the team deployed hidden, automated camera-speaker systems at the intersection of paths in the Tuchola Forest that, when triggered by an animal passing within a short distance (10 meters), filmed the response of the animal to hearing either humans speaking calmly in Polish, dogs barking or non-threatening controls (bird calls).

Wolves were more than twice as likely to run, and twice as fast to abandon the site, after hearing humans compared to control sounds (birds). The same was true of wolves' prey (deer and wild boar).

By demonstrating experimentally that wolves fear humans, the study verifies that fear of humans, who are predominantly active in the daytime, forces wolves to restrict their activities to the night.

Wolves were 4.9 times more nocturnal (active at night) than humans. In fact, wolves are not just nocturnal where Zanette and her team did their study, but everywhere humans are present, as shown in a recent continent-wide survey. This new experiment establishes that the reason is because wolves everywhere are fearful of humans.

"Wolves are not exceptional in fearing humans—and they have good reason to fear us," said Zanette, a renowned wildlife ecologist.

"Global surveys show humans kill prey at much higher rates than other predators and kill large carnivores like wolves at on average nine times the rate they die naturally, making humans a 'super predator.'"

Consistent with humanity's unique lethality, growing experimental evidence from every inhabited continent demonstrates that wildlife worldwide, including other large carnivores like leopards, hyenas and cougars, fear the human 'super predator' above all else.

Legally protected but still fearful

"Legal protection does not change wolves' fear of humans, because legal protection does not mean not killing wolves, it means not exterminating them. This is an important distinction," said Zanette.

Humans remain very much a 'super predator' of wolves even where wolves are strictly protected, such as in the European Union, where humans legally and illegally kill wolves at seven times the rate they die naturally. France, for example, allows up to 20% of the wolf population to be legally killed every year. Human killing of wolves in North America is comparable.

"At these rates, any truly fearless wolf that did not avoid humans would very soon be a dead wolf," said Zanette.

Legal protection leading to fearless wolves—not scientifically supported

Wolves are now reoccupying areas in Europe and North America where they had been exterminated, leading to increased human-wolf encounters. This increase in encounters has been attributed to legal protection allowing the emergence of fearless wolves, but these new experimental results demonstrate this assumption is not scientifically supported.

"For wolves—like all creatures great and small—fear is primarily about food, specifically, how to avoid becoming food while trying to find food. Focusing on this fundamental risk-reward trade-off is critical," said Zanette. "The certainty that wolves fear humans means we need to re-focus attention on what counterbalances this fear, rather than whether wolves are fearless."

Humans are both uniquely lethal and unique in being normally surrounded by super-abundant, super-high-quality food. Results of the study strongly indicate any apparently fearless wolf is actually a fearful wolf risking proximity to humans to get a bite of our 'superfoods."

The real problem, said Zanette, is how to keep the wolf from our human food.

"The critical significance of our study lies in re-focusing the discourse on human-wolf conflict toward public education on food storage, garbage removal and livestock protection—reducing wolf access to human foodstuffs," said Zanette.

"What our study establishes is that there is no alternate problem to contend with. There is no 'big bad wolf' unafraid of the human 'super predator.'"