The Dog Family: Wolves, Dogs, and Dingoes

Eurasian wolf

The best known and most familiar of the species in the dog family is surely the grey wolf (Canis lupus). This is not least because it is the one that we happen to have domesticated, and which most of us see just about every day. Even the wild form is so familiar that there are a great many wildlife documentaries and web pages out there that cover the species better than I can in one blog post, and I don't want to go too much over that ground. But nonetheless, for the sake of completeness, at least some sort of overview is needed here.

The term "grey wolf" is the generally accepted one for the species as a whole. While there are other species that are referred to as wolves, this is the one that we generally mean when we say the word "wolf" without qualification. Most other terms, such as "timber wolf", "steppe wolf", and so on, refer either to groups of one or more subspecies, or are simply alternative terms for the same animal. Once being spread throughout almost the entire Northern Hemisphere (albeit to only a limited extent in Africa), it is unsurprising that there are rather a lot of subspecies.

But how many? That's a question of some debate. I have talked before about how difficult it can be, in practice, to separate one species from another; the problem is even worse when you're trying to count subspecies. One scheme, for instance, has as many as 24 subspecies in North America alone, while another, more conservative, scheme recognises just twelve worldwide. There are a great many opinions that lie somewhere in between.