Wolves have long stalked the dark forests of fairy tales and the human imagination. While it’s true that they are some of nature’s most socially intelligent hunters, the truth is they’re not very dangerous to humans. In fact, there have only been 25 documented wolf attacks on humans in North America in the past 70 years. For comparison, domesticated dogs — man’s best (and bi-est) friend — kill more than three dozen Americans per year. Of course, dogs came from wolves, so it shouldn’t surprise us that these misunderstood canids are bi as well.
It turns out that wolves aren’t the big bad monsters from folklore, nor are they symbols of the “alpha” male. For many years, it was believed that wolf packs were led by a dominant alpha who fought their way to the top. Then scientists studied wolves in the wild more closely and discovered that wolf packs are nearly always wolf families. At some point after they reach maturity, most wolves “disperse”, leaving their pack and living a solitary life until they find a mate, bond, and have pups of their own, creating a new pack. The breeding pair are not alphas dominating the pack with their Big Wolf Energy; they are parents raising and guiding their children. Wolves, it turns out, are much more mundane than people think. They’re also a helluva lot freakier.
Wolves are among the plethora of animals documented to engage in same-sex behavior, from the gray wolves of North America, Europe, and Asia, to the African wolf of north and western Africa.
Decades of research gathered in the 1999 book Biological Exuberance detail a fascinating picture of wolf bisexual behavior. Males will mount one another while still showing sexual interest in females. In many circumstances, they’ll even ignore low-ranking females in favor of sexual activity with other males. This same-sex behavior occurs most often when nearby females are in heat. It appears that when male wolves watch heterosexual mating in their vicinity, it excites them into bouts of sex with one another. In some cases, male wolves have been observed mounting other males while they are mating with a female. Likewise, female wolves sometimes assume the dominant position by mounting and thrusting against males, known as reverse mounting. Yes, wolves engage in voyeurism, MMF bi sex, and the lupine equivalent of pegging. That’s enough to make anyone howl at the moon.
The biologist J.B.S. Haldane once wrote, “my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”. To be sure, writing in 1927, he meant “queer” in its more archaic sense as a synonym for “peculiar”. But the animal world in general, and wolves in particular, show that he was more right than he could possibly know, and in more ways than one.
