A video circulating online shows something conservationists say has not been documented before in Greece: a puppy living, and apparently being cared for, inside a wolf pack in the country’s mountainous north.
The footage was recorded by drone by Thodoris Komninos, a researcher who has been following the pack in Macedonia, the broad region that covers much of northern Greece, as part of his doctoral work.
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Rather than treating the young dog as prey or as a rival, the wolves appear to have folded it into the group. Nikos Panagiotopoulos, who heads wild animal care at the Kastoria Environmental Protection Society, based in the northern Greek town of Kastoria, said the animals are effectively raising it as one of their own.
“The pack sort of adopted this little puppy,” he said. “It’s very small, so there’s no competition, but what strikes us is that they’re passing their own behavior on to it. And by behavior, I mean they bring it food, they carry food to it, they take it to drink water.”
The puppy came from a sheep farm near the area where the wolves live, according to Panagiotopoulos.
It is not the first time the same pack has taken in a stray. Last February the wolves adopted a black puppy, but the animal did not survive the cold temperatures.
Panagiotopoulos played down concerns that the arrangement could lead to mating or to the birth of wolf and dog hybrids. The pack’s strict hierarchy and the intense competition within it, he said, make that unlikely. He expects the dog to go its own way as it matures. “We believe that when the puppy grows up, following the biological instincts of each species, it will leave the group, it will find other dogs and join them,” he said. “This behavior is unusual. It hasn’t been recorded before, and we hope the animal will eventually leave.”
