Myth

In their own environment, Wolves consider humans as food and will hunt and attack single people (especially small girls in red outfits).

Films, books, plays and television all show scenes of terrified people fighting wolves away with burning sticks. Such is the threat from Wolves that medieval Europeans invented stories to warn children of the threat.

The situation is made worse if you happen to stumble across a pack; which will defend itself to the death.

Top put this is context, the recent film "The Day After Tomorrow" includes a entire sequence where the young hero and his friends have to escape from wolves.

Reality

Firstly, lets examine the fact that ALL dogs, bare none are in fact descended from Wolves. Thousands of years ago early man learned to work and eventually domesticate Wolves in a symbiotic relationship.

But putting that aside, in the last 50 years there has only been 17 cases across Europe and Russia of people being killed by a wolf and none of them were caused when the wolves acted defensively.

The vast majority of all attacks on people over the centuries were by rapid wolves.

Records dating back hundreds of years in France, Russia, Estonia and northern Italy show a surprisingly low amount of fatal attacks and next to none by packs.

The popular idea of packs of wolves running across the countryside eating people at the drop of the hat is simply not true.

Tags: Wolves, kill