However, the study's authors say that safety from wolves requires behavioral change on the part of humans, including keeping food and livestock secure and away from the canids.
After years of being hunting to near-extinction, wolves are making a comeback in some of their historical ranges in Europe and North America. With their return comes a growing concern that the predators are moving too close to human settlements, becoming bolder and less fearful of people. Researchers set out to see if that's true, running a four-month-long experiment in Poland's Tuchola Forest. Their findings suggest that the "big bad wolf," as portrayed in popular culture, still has a healthy fear of humans.
Tuchola Forest in northern Poland is representative of the human-dominated wildlife landscape wolves are reoccupying across Europe, with a mix of pine plantations, farms and towns, the authors write in their recent study. Wolves (Canis lupus) were first spotted there in 2005; today, the forest has about 15 wolf packs.
To see how fearful they are of humans, researchers attached camera-speaker units to trees along 24 forest road intersection across 1,100 square kilometers (425 square miles) of Tuchola, covering the ranges of 10 wolf packs.
The speakers played one of three audio recordings when triggered by motion: women and men speaking calmly in Polish; dogs barking; and a control sound of bird calls, a natural part of the forest. The researchers then made hundreds of recordings to see how wolves and their prey, such as red deer (Cervus elaphus), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa), responded to these playbacks.
The study found both wolves and their prey fear humans. Wolves fled 2.4 times as often and abandoned the site twice as fast when they heard human voices compared to bird calls. Meanwhile, the deer and wild boar ran 3.4 times as often and abandoned the sites 2.4 times faster after hearing humans compared to the control sound.
The camera recordings also showed that both wolves and their prey were more than four times more active at night compared to humans, who use Tuchola Forest mostly during the day for forestry and recreation, including hunting deer and wild boar.
A 2024 study using camera traps in six European countries found that wolves were more active at night in all places with human presence. Only in locations like the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone in Ukraine, completely abandoned by humans, were wolves more active during the day.
Liana Zanette, study co-author and an ecologist at Western University, Canada, told Mongabay by email that it's previously been argued that wolves are mostly nocturnal because their prey are afraid of humans and are the ones trying to avoid people. "In Europe, deer and wild boar are hunted while wolves are legally protected so there is good reason to expect this alternative explanation could be true," Zanette said.
But the Poland study experimentally demonstrates that wolves are nocturnal in human-dominated landscapes because they, too, fear people, she added.
The experiment confirming that wolves fear humans is a first, but Zanette and her colleagues have conducted similar experiments on other wildlife and found comparable results. In South Africa's Greater Kruger National Park, for example, they found that all the wildlife they studied, from herbivores like elephants, impalas, warthogs and giraffes to predators like leopards and hyenas, were more fearful of human sounds than the sound of lions (Panthera leo), otherwise considered the top savanna predator. In another study, pumas (Puma concolor) in the U.S. fled from their kill sites upon hearing pre-recorded human voices.
Michael Clinchy from Western University, co-author of the wolf, lion and puma studies, told Mongabay by email that the experiment on wolves in Tuchola Forest confirms that fear of humans is "ingrained" in wildlife everywhere, even where they're legally protected. That's likely because "legal protection does not mean not killing, it means not exterminating," Clinchy said.
"The wolf doesn't care whether it's being killed legally or illegally, all it knows is that if it goes anywhere near a human it's got a very good chance of getting killed, and that its chance of being killed by a human is far, far higher than the chance of being killed by anything else," he said.
"We are far and away the most dangerous thing in the wolf's universe," he added.
Chris Darimont, an ecologist at the University of Victoria, Canada, who wasn't involved in the study, told The New York Times that the study "marches us closer to realizing unequivocally that humans are the top dog."
In May, the European Union agreed to lower the wolf's legal status from "strictly protected" to "protected," making it easier to hunt the canids.
Even when strictly protected, some countries permitted legal wolf killing. "On average across the EU, during the period when wolves were 'strictly protected' (up to now), they were legally or illegally killed by humans at 7 times the rate they die naturally," Zanette said.
The May EU decision was informed in part by a 2023 European Commission Report that noted "the emergence of fearless wolves, whose behaviour is reinforced when they obtain food from humans or are even fed on purpose."
Zanette told Mongabay that wolves that approach humans or their settlements do so mostly because people leave food out, fail to dispose of their garbage properly, or have unsecured or improperly disposed of livestock.
Canada, for instance, is home to some 60,000 wolves, and a recent study found that people there generally have a positive outlook toward the canids. Zanette attributed this tolerance to people following government guidance.
"Our governments provide public education regarding human safety around wolves that overwhelmingly concerns keeping them from your food (pets, food, garbage, no food in tents). Everything you already know to do as a Canadian, living in a country full of bears," Zanette said.
She added that in parts of Europe and the U.S. where wolves are now reappearing after a long period of absence, a change in human behavior is needed. "And this does require dollars or euros," she said.
"Human safety regarding wolves is definitely something that needs to be taken seriously and the 'take home' here is 'do not feed the wildlife.'"
Citations:
Kasper, K., Say-Sallaz, E., Clinchy, M., Pallari, N., Szewczyk, M., Churski, M., ... Kuijper, D. P. (2025). Wolves and their prey all fear the human "super predator". Current Biology. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2025.09.018
Smith, A. F., Kasper, K., Lazzeri, L., Schulte, M., Kudrenko, S., Say-Sallaz, E., ... Heurich, M. (2024). Reduced human disturbance increases diurnal activity in wolves, but not Eurasian lynx. Global Ecology and Conservation, 53, e02985. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2024.e02985
Suraci, J. P., Smith, J. A., Clinchy, M., Zanette, L. Y., & Wilmers, C. C. (2019). Humans, but not their dogs, displace pumas from their kills: An experimental approach. Scientific Reports, 9(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-019-48742-9
Clinchy, M., Zanette, L. Y., Roberts, D., Suraci, J. P., Buesching, C. D., Newman, C., & Macdonald, D. W. (2016). Fear of the human "super predator" far exceeds the fear of large carnivores in a model mesocarnivore. Behavioral Ecology, 27(6), 1826-1832. doi:10.1093/beheco/arw117
Zanette, L. Y., Frizzelle, N. R., Clinchy, M., Peel, M. J., Keller, C. B., Huebner, S. E., & Packer, C. (2023). Fear of the human "super predator" pervades the South African savanna. Current Biology, 33(21), 4689-4696.e4. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2023.08.089
Rutherford, S., Fraser-Celin, V.-L., Hager, H. A., Fox, L., & Hofman, A. (2024). The social landscape of wolves in Canada -- Preliminary findings. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 30(2), 240-247. doi:10.1080/10871209.2024.2360741
Banner image: A gray wolf in Europe. Image by Mikkel Houmøller via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).