Not that breeding hasn’t created a lot of issues in many dog breeds, but something I always notice with wolf stats is that their lifespan in captivity is always listed as “up to” and I don’t tend to see anywhere saying what an average lifespan in captivity is. Maybe that stat is out there but in my casual googling around I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Which makes me think that some of those life span claims may be based on outliers. You get the odd dog that lives past the average life expectancy for it’s breed too, but it would be a bit misleading to say that French Mastiffs can live to be up to 12 years old because a couple have lived that long even though the average lifespan is half of that.

And let’s not forget that the grey wolf’s native range was almost the entire northern hemisphere in just about every climate imaginable. That leaves a lot of room for different populations with genetic variations. Different populations of wolves can vary pretty greatly in size, Indian and Arabian wolves only average around 25kg, north American wolves about 36, European wolves around 38.5, and while places like Alaska and Russia have turned out a few giants in the 70kg+ range, wolves over 54kg are overall pretty uncommon. That puts a lot of wolves in the same weight class as a medium or large sized dog, not giant breeds, and 15 years, while not exactly common, isn’t quite so unheard of either for a lot of breeds in that weight range.

And trying to find specific stats on the lifespan of those different wolf populations is definitely outside of what I was able to find with a little casual googling and skimming Wikipedia.

Of course 15 years might very well be a perfectly ordinary lifespan for a wolf. I don’t know, I don’t feel comfortable saying one way or the other from the stats I was able to find with the amount of effort I was willing to put into it, and I’m certainly no biologist studying wolves or anything of the sort.

I started googling this earlier today to comment on a different post about this where someone asked about what the lifespan of dogs would be without human meddling, and I thought to myself “well that’s basically wolves.” And I started off intending to skim a few pages for the relevant numbers and say something like “wolves live about X much longer than similarly sized dogs” with “X” being kind of an average from a few different sources because I expected some variation in the numbers, but I saw a lot more variation in the numbers than I expected, and some of the way things were phrased felt like they were answering different questions than what I was asking, which kind of sent up some red flags for me, and I ended up not commenting on that time because I didn’t feel like I had a solid answer.

I still don’t, but in this context I think it’s important to stop and think about the data and ask questions like

Are the wolves that get up to 70kg the same ones that can live up to 15 (or I even saw claims of up to 20) years? Or is it maybe smaller wolves that can live that long? Are we making fair comparisons between dogs breeds and similarly-sized wolves, or are we comparing giant breeds to the smallest wolves out there?

Are these ages averages, or are they the top end outliers that are more of a theoretically maximum than something that’s likely to happen?

Is the genetic diversity of different wolf populations being taken into account properly?

How fair is it to compare the lifespan of wolves and dogs? They’re closely related to be sure, to the point they’re generally considered to be part of the same species, but there’s also very significant differences in their biology as well.

I hope someone is more dedicated than I am and can dig up the data I’m looking for, and my gut says that wolves probably do have longer potential lifespans than dogs, but I’m not very confident in just how big the difference is.