ZIYA TONG: It’s a cool winter morning in the northwestern United States. In the distance, the sun is just beginning to peek over the mountains. In a forest clearing, a small group of elk linger, nibbling at the grass that pokes up through a fresh blanket of snow. Slowly, they make their way along the river, keeping an eye out for more food. Suddenly, one elk lifts her head. She and her companions freeze. They’re being watched. By something just beyond the treeline. The elk begin to run. Their hooves punch through the snow. Behind them, a silent enemy is gaining on them. They crash through the trees, veering left and right as they go. In every direction, yellow eyes glow in the darkness. For decades, the elk living in this region had little reason to run. But today is different. A truck has arrived from the Canadian prairies, carrying passengers this landscape hasn’t seen in a very, very long time. Today, the wolves are back.

THEME UP

ZIYA TONG: I’m Ziya Tong, a science broadcaster and explorer of our beautiful planet. I’ve spent my career bringing nature to people and people to nature. On this podcast, we’re meeting the incredible species that call Canada home—and the people working to protect them. From WWF-Canada, you’re listening to This Is Wild.

THEME RESOLVE

ZIYA TONG: Are you a cat person or a dog person? I’ll be honest, I’m more of an octopus person….but I digress. If you’re a dog person, here’s a fun fact: every single one of the dogs we keep as pets, from the majestic Great Dane to the poodle with a fancy haircut, is descended from a much more controversial creature: the grey wolf.

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: Some people really love wolves. They love them so much and they identify with them. And some people really hate them. There is not a lot of people who fall in between.

ZIYA TONG: This is Stephanie Rutherford. She teaches in the School of the Environment at Trent University in Ontario. She’s also done a ton of research and writing about the special relationship between people and wolves throughout history. In Canada, that relationship goes way back. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: So, you know, before colonization, Indigenous—and presently, right, because this hasn't changed for lots of Indigenous folks—the relationship with wolves was one often of kinship, right? And even, you know, understanding animals as nations unto themselves and thinking about how wolves can teach us how to be better humans.

ZIYA TONG: Indigenous Peoples across North America have always had deep respect for wolves. Cree teachings represent wolves as advisors and guides, and suggest observing wolves to learn survival and hunting skills. In some Aniishinaabe creation stories, wolves and humans were originally brothers!

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: Wolves have these specific characteristics, right? They are patient hunters. They care for their young. They bond in packs. They're very social. And so all of these characteristics are things that we can learn from.

ZIYA TONG: Wolves live in family units called packs. The mother and father wolves, also known as the alpha male and female, mate for life. They usually live with four to six of their offspring, who help hunt and protect their mother while she cares for new pups. Once the pups get bigger, their older siblings might babysit, so to speak, while the parents go out to find food. Wolf pups love playing, just like dog puppies—and human kids, for that matter. They even practice hunting with the wolf equivalent of toys, like bones and feathers, which they “kill” over and over again and carry around as trophies. It’s easy to see why so many people feel connected to these creatures. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: And so we can look to the ways in which, and this is what, you know, Indigenous teachings show, is that we can observe and understand from the ways that wolves organize themselves, how we might organize themselves in ways that are better and predicated on ethical relationships and coexistence.

ZIYA TONG: And that’s exactly what many Indigenous people did for millennia. But everything changed when colonization began. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: Those weren't the stories that settlers brought with them. They brought very different kinds of stories rooted in, like, the land is for humans, primarily. And so anything that threatened that was seen as problematic and so, you know, many European settlers came from countries where wolves had already been exterminated.

ZIYA TONG: In Europe, wolves definitely weren’t kin. According to Stephanie, they were much more likely to be seen as monsters. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: Wolves howled and often are not seen and that generated a lot of terror for white settlers, that they were to be consumed whole and that they were being stalked by these huge packs of wolves and so on. So they carried lots of these kinds of anxieties and fears with them.

ZIYA TONG: This is where we get stories like the Three Little Pigs or Little Red Riding Hood—stories that depict wolves as devious, dangerous, and not to be trusted.  

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: I spent a long time talking about how those stories of like, you know, ravening wolves ripping apart babies and all sorts of things really contributed to this fear that settlers had about wolves and justified all sorts of measures for elimination.

ZIYA TONG: It isn’t like there’s no reason to be afraid of wolves. They’re skilled hunters, they can run as fast as 60 kilometres an hour, and they’re very big; they can weigh over 40 kilograms and get up to 2 metres long. But the settlers didn’t just fear the danger wolves posed to their own safety. Wolves are carnivores, and they especially like elk and deer. These are examples of ungulates, or animals with hooves. Settlers brought lots of ungulates with them from Europe, like cows, sheep, and other livestock. And the local wolf packs were very interested. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: The massive transfer of animals that were not used to predation into this new landscape was kind of a buffet for wolves, but meant that settlers saw them as an economic threat.

ZIYA TONG: And for those European settlers in America, any threat, especially an economic threat, needed to be eliminated.

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: There was a really systematic effort to remove wolves from the landscape. Because you need a systematic effort to be able to do that. Wolves are pretty smart. They have learned largely to avoid humans because we are their top predator. They were very effective at killing almost every wolf they could find.

ZIYA TONG: Before these extermination efforts, the continental United States was home to somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 wild grey wolves. By the early 20th century, they were essentially extinct. But, as you might have guessed, that was not the end of the story for these animals.

JESSICA CURRIE: So wolves have to keep the ecosystem in balance. So it's not just about what they're eating per se, because we know they're an apex predator, but even their presence within an ecosystem can kind of affect the behavior of the other species.

ZIYA TONG: This is Jessica Currie. She works at WWF-Canada, but not in the way you might imagine. She spends most of her time doing data analysis. 

JESSICA CURRIE: I don't get to hang out with polar bears, which is what I envisioned, but probably for the best. [laughs] 

ZIYA TONG: One of Jessica’s responsibilities at WWF is putting together the Living Planet Report Canada, which offers a big picture view of the health of ecosystems across the country. The 2025 issue of the report is all about interconnectedness—the idea that every species is a vital part of a delicate balance. 

JESSICA CURRIE: So you could think of this as like, I don't know, if you have a thread in your shirt and you kind of, like, tug at it and then the whole thing starts falling apart and you're like, dang it! That's kind of what we're talking about. So if you kind of like pull a keystone species, or do something that affects how many of those species there are, it has these ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem.

ZIYA TONG: As Jessica was working on the report, she found that wolves were a particularly useful example for conveying these ideas. You see, when the wolves were brought to the brink of extinction in the United States, their absence did not go unnoticed. One of the most striking examples of the wolves’ disappearance played out in a place you’ve probably heard of: Yellowstone National Park. When the park was established in Wyoming in 1872, hunting was banned. But predators were excluded from those protections, including the roughly 200 grey wolves living in the area.

In fact, hunters were often encouraged to kill wolves in the interest of protecting other animals. And by the end of 1926, there was not a single grey wolf left in Yellowstone National Park. And once that thread was pulled, the fabric of Yellowstone quickly started to unravel.

JESSICA CURRIE: So wolves prey upon species like deer and elk, and they keep those populations in check. So if they're not preying upon those species, it means that elk and deer can kind of run rampant to some degree, and what they do is they overgraze vegetation.

ZIYA TONG: With no wolves to hunt them, the population of elk in the park exploded. There were still predators, like bears and mountain lions, but they usually don’t move as quickly or hunt as efficiently as wolves. Apex predators like wolves tend to keep prey animals on the move. Without that predatory pressure, the now overflowing population of elk could spend all of their time by the river, where water and delicious plants like willow were available whenever they wanted. 

JESSICA CURRIE: So instead of having this like beautiful woody debris and forests and vegetation, they graze it all, doesn't really let anything grow, and then you have this like completely different landscape that's grassy and a bit barren, which means that can then lead to erosion of the riverbank and it can then lead to floods and it has all of these ripple effects, which we call trophic cascades.

ZIYA TONG: A trophic cascade is basically a domino effect, a series of interactions within the food web when one part of the ecosystem is suppressed. And the trophic cascade in Yellowstone just kept going and going. For example, elk aren’t the only species that enjoys eating willow plants. Willow is actually a major food source for beavers. But there wasn’t much willow left for the local beavers in Yellowstone because there were so many elk staying by the river and eating it all up. So the beavers started to die off. Beavers build dams that have a major impact on stream hydrology. Because the beaver population was getting smaller and smaller, the rivers started to suffer. And all of the creatures that depend on that river started to suffer, too. And so on, and so on, and so on.

JESSICA CURRIE: You kind of think of like, how can a wolf do that, right? Like, we're talking about one species here.

ZIYA TONG: Wolves are a perfect example of a keystone species. One animal that has an outsized effect on their ecosystem.

JESSICA CURRIE: The role of these species in influencing their broader health of the habitat, the soil health, the water, the carbon emissions, it goes so much more beyond just, ah, wolves are scary, or here's just one species. It's kind of mind-boggling to think of their influence.

ZIYA TONG: Slowly but surely, the conversation around wolves in Yellowstone National Park changed. More and more scientists believed that they would need to find a way to bring them back. Here’s Stephanie Rutherford again.

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: As part of the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s, there was stipulations around recovery of species that had been eliminated from the landscape, particularly keystone species like wolves. And this began a decades-long kind of negotiation about whether wolves were going to be reintroduced to Yellowstone, because wolves are highly politicized.

ZIYA TONG: Unsurprisingly, people who lived near the park were a bit concerned that the new wolves might escape and attack them or their livestock. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: When a predator is gone for a long time from a landscape and comes back, the sort of fear associated with that is really heightened. What are the impacts going to be? Are they going to eat everything they see, you know? The sort of cultural touchstones of the wolf get triggered, right, because people don't have any experience of living with them.

ZIYA TONG: The debate about whether to bring wolves back to the area went on for more than 15 years. But finally, in 1995, U.S. and Canadian wildlife officials captured 14 wolves from around Jasper National Park in Alberta and brought them to Yellowstone. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: They were worried that the wolves were going to leave, right? They thought, oh they're going to go back to Canada. But there was so many elk and so many things for them to prey on and to like, be a really vital part of the ecosystem that they thrived.

ZIYA TONG: The new resident wolves explored the land and hunted elk and other small animals. They found mates, they established territory. And eventually, they had pups—the first wolf pups to be born in the park in almost 70 years. Once wolf pups reach around two years old, they have a choice to make: do they stay with the pack, or head out on their own? Those that choose the lone wolf life spend their days looking for food and howling as loud as they can, hoping a potential mate will hear them. They also use their sense of smell, examining the scents left by other wolves to gather intel, everything from sex to social rank to diet. And if they’re lucky, they find a suitable mate, and start a pack of their own. Which is exactly what happened in Yellowstone. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: And so the packs began to grow, they kind of split off, if you look at a map of Yellowstone now you can see the different packs in different places. And they thrived and they reshaped that ecosystem, or rather, shaped it back to what it once was, right?

ZIYA TONG: As of 2024, there are around 108 wolves in Yellowstone National Park, distributed across nine packs. And now that the elk have to keep moving to avoid predators again, the willows have recovered. That means more habitat for birds, more food for beavers, healthier rivers, and less erosion. It really is all connected. In Canada, we didn’t go quite as far to eliminate our wolf population. And it would be nice to say that has to do with a strong environmental ethic, but really, it kind of just came down to chance.

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: In Canada, I think by the virtue of our geography, wolves had more places to go and they moved north, right, or away from settled areas. Our efforts at extermination were not as successful, largely because they were not systematized, I would say, in quite the same way. And so they stuck around, right? But I would not say it’s because any federal or provincial authority, at least until recently, has championed the case of wolves. I would say it's more of an accident of geography than anything else.

ZIYA TONG: Today, Canada has one of the largest grey wolf populations in the world, with between 50 and 60,000 spread out across the country. Grey wolves are considered a secure species in Canada, which means that their population is healthy. But there’s another species of wolf that isn’t quite so lucky: the Algonquin wolf, also known as the eastern grey wolf.

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: When people picture a wolf in their heads, they're usually thinking of a grey wolf, right, like a bigger, kind of looks like maybe a husky or something, or a malamute, but you have an idea in your head of what a wolf is. Those Algonquin wolves are a little bit different.

ZIYA TONG: Eastern grey wolves are genetically distinct from other grey wolves in Canada. They do look similar, but they’re smaller. You can only find them in Algonquin Provincial Park in southern Ontario. And there are only 236 of them left. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: Because they make their home in Algonquin Park, there's certain kinds of pressures, right? It's like the Yellowstone case, right, like inside Algonquin Park, it's not big enough, right? Like it's not a big enough protected area for them to thrive.

ZIYA TONG: One of the difficulties with protecting wolves is that their range is huge. A wolf pack’s territory can be anywhere from 130 to over 2500 square kilometers, which is almost half the size of the entire province of Prince Edward Island. And in the case of Algonquin wolves, that range is unusually close to a lot of human settlements. So even though hunting wolves is prohibited in Algonquin Provincial Park and the townships that surround it, that doesn’t mean they’re completely out of danger. When wolves leave the protected area to look for a mate or to hunt, they’re often killed by hunters and trappers. In fact, the only real threat to apex predators like wolves is, well, us. Here’s Jessica Currie again. 

JESSICA CURRIE: I think it's important to note that human influence has obviously shifted and shaped how species are interacting as well. So, we have carved out roads through forests or created linear features, which really means like roads, or power lines, trains, that sort of thing. And wolves are now able to like run down these, they basically just opened it up for them, right? Like now they're able to just like, go wherever they want. And the issue is now they have access to species that weren't really their prey before. So it just becomes this kind of like convoluted conversation where it's like, do we hurt one species to help another? Like, how does this all interact and what are the outcomes? And I think that's just something important to remember, is that we're impacting, kind of, the ecosystem just as much as some of these species are and we need to figure out how to keep everything in balance. Not just one species, but all the species within the country.

ZIYA TONG: Most conservation stories relate back to human behaviour, but in the case of wolves, we’ve played a particularly active role. Algonquin wolves are put at risk by human hunters. Grey wolves were wiped out in the United States because of human economic concerns, but they were brought back by human scientists who wanted to restore balance to the ecosystem. That brings us back to that idea of interconnectedness. A change to the status of one species, especially a keystone species, can have a much larger impact over time. 

JESSICA CURRIE: When we're thinking of wolves, we need to think of how does all of these policy changes or conservation actions or protections ladder up so that they get, like, basically coverage across Canada in order to help them thrive. We can do this through, like, protected areas, restoring different areas, and also legislative changes. And as soon as we kind of take away one of those features, we lose the connectivity of those habitats for the wolves. We start, like, restricting where they can go. And then that has ripple effects on the genetic diversity, if they can't go as far and mate with new wolves, then you're kind of restricting the pool of genes that move on and then there's also, like, less prey availability or something like that. So by affecting the connectivity of landscapes it really becomes kind of this really problematic issue that then eventually probably does lead to having a species at risk or a threatened species.

ZIYA TONG: That’s why the choices we make today matter. Because the more we limit where wolves can roam and how much space we’re willing to share, the more we risk pushing them out for good. From Stephanie Rutherford’s perspective, that’s not just a loss for the wolves, it’s a loss for all of us. 

STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD: One of the most amazing examples of nature interpretation is the Algonquin Park Wolf Howl, where people go to Algonquin Park, they hear a talk about wolves and then they go and line up on highway 60. Like 2000 people, right, get out of their cars and the park naturalist will howl like a wolf and then wait for the wolves to respond. Like, it's this magical amazing experience and people write about it as if, like, it's life-changing for them, right?

ZIYA TONG: Maybe it’s the haunting sounds of those howls, or maybe it’s the strong family connections that remind us of our own. But wolves have a way of capturing our imaginations. We fear them, follow them, and turn them into stories. But here’s the thing: wolves hold real power in the natural world. They help keep ecosystems balanced and healthy. And that means that protecting them isn’t just about saving one species—it’s about protecting the whole system that depends on them. So the question is: what role do we want to play in their story?

THEME UP

ZIYA TONG: Thanks for joining us today on This Is Wild! I’m your host, Ziya Tong. To learn more about grey wolves, Algonquin wolves, and WWF-Canada’s conservation work across the country, you can go to wwf.ca/thisiswild. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on your favourite podcast app, and don’t forget to share this show with your friends! And if you have any questions or suggestions for the show, you can send us an email at thisiswild@wwfcanada.org. This Is Wild is created by WWF-Canada and Antica Productions. Our executive producers are Geoff Siskind, Laura Regehr, and Stuart Coxe. This episode was written and produced by Emily Morantz. Our production team at WWF-Canada is Joshua Ostroff, Erin Saunders, and Tina Knezevic. Nicole MacAdam is WWF's VP of Comms. Mixing and sound design by Philip Wilson. 

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