Wolf pups fighting inside den in northern Minnesota

Sometimes wolf pups aren’t that up! This Huron Pack pup “fight” from a week ago is a good example of the dominance behavior that develops amongst pups in a litter at an early age (these pups are ~4 weeks old). Some pups in a litter are much more aggressive and dominant while others are more submissive and subdued. We have quite a bit of footage from the past few year of pups play fighting or wrestling with one another but this interaction was a quite bit different. This was the most aggressive interaction we have seen amongst pups so far. Nothing about this interaction seemed like playful behavior. In particular, the “submissive“ pup was crying out likely because the dominant pup was biting it so hard. We have not heard a pup vocalize like this before on our videos. What would be interesting is to figure out is how dominance behavior translates in to survival. Do the most dominant pups end up having a higher probability of survival and vice-versa? An interesting question that would be really hard to actually study in a place like Voyageurs. If you want to see more neat footage like this, please donate to our trail camera fund (link below) so that we can purchase more cameras and capture/share more footage like this!