Image of 3 wolves' misinformation-corrected by Snopes

Dan Evon

Apr 15, 2016

Claim: A photograph shows a female wolf protecting a male's throat during a fight.

miscaptioned

Example: [Collected via Reddit, April 2016]

The female wolf appears to hide under the male.She's actually covering his throat from their assailant,whilst pretending to be scared.

Origin:A photograph purportedly showing a female wolf "pretending" to be scared so that she could protect a male wolf's throat during a fight started recirculating on the internet after it was posted to the web site Reddit in April 2016. While the photograph is real, the caption often associated with it is incorrect.
The image was taken in Ely, Minnesota by photographer Jean Paul, and was simply captioned "Wolf Fight!" when she first uploaded it to Flickr on 27 March 2009. While Paul didn't provide much background information about the image, we talked to Cameron Feaster, the wolf specialist at the International Wolf Center in Ely.
According to Feaster, all three wolves in the photograph are male, and the "female wolf" in the image wasn't trying to protect the male wolf's throat. According to Cameron, this photograph was simply taken at the moment one wolf backed away and accidentally bumped into another:

I've gotten many messages about this photo. Sad to say that little of anything in that photo's statement is correct.
Firstly, there is not a single female in that photo. Shadow (the white male wolf) is giving a threat display to Denali (the taller of the two brown wolves, also male), and Aidan (the crouching male wolf). Aidan is simply submitting and trying to back away, and the photo was taken when he had accidentally bumped into Denali.
We had one female in the pack at the time this photo was taken, and she looked very different from any of the animals in the photo (Grey and white pelage).

It is common to anthropomorphize animals and ascribe their behavior to human emotions.  However, the behavior that this photograph purportedly shows (complete with trickery, altruism, and human-like complexity of emotion) has not been observed in wolves.

Last updated: 15 April 2016

Originally published: 15 April 2016

Featured Image: Wikipedia

Dan Evon is a Chicago-based writer and longtime truth enthusiast. His work has appeared somewhere, and he earned a degree at the University of His Choosing. His exploration of Internet truth has been supported by grants from the Facebook Drug Task Force.

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