maya – Dec 22, 2008 12:00 AM

Maya is the scent rolling queen. Her video this week shows her response to scent stimulus, doing a full roll on back behavior for several minutes. This is good for the pups; When Maya's occupied, things are calmer here. We do see her dominance increase if there's activity around the wolf yard, and if there's a howling bout. Aidan continues to be the focus of Maya's dominance, but he is taking it in stride. When he sees her coming, he submits or tries to climb under some rocks to face her. When she's done, he shakes it off and continues whatever he was doing. The female dominance in inherently more intense than males, even in a spayed and neutered exhibit. This is likely due to the role that the females play in reducing pack overpopulation by having only one female breeding. As I said, spaying only calms this behavior, it doesn't eliminate it. This is why we decided to manage only one female, if we had two females in this pack, the aggression would be much more intense. To stimulate the pack, we did two enclosure enrichments last week, one was scent based that resulted in scent rolling behavior, the other was food based that stimulated the wolves to search and find treats. A YouTube video showing both enclosure enrichment activities will be posted.