In this thread about the delisting of gray wolves as an endangered species there seems to be a significant difference of opinion about how dangerous wolves really are.
Specific to wolves preying on humans there seems to a significant theme in a lot of literature form before industrialization about packs of wolves gong after individual humans or even groups of humans. The stories of wolf packs chasing Russian horse drawn sleighs full of people across the steppes is one such example.
How accurate is this? Will hungry wolf packs hunt humans or groups of humans if they get the opportunity?
ISTR that in Never Cry Wolf Mowat claims that there have been no substantiated claims of wolves (Note: wolves, not dog-wolf hybrids) in good health attacking humans. When rabies, or near debilitation from a regional famine come into play, attacks have been known to happen.
The problem I have with that claim is twofold. First - prior to genetic testing how on earth could one know that one was dealing for certain with a pure wolf? Second - even if that claim is true, rabies is endemic to enough species and geogrpahic areas that even though a rabid wolf attack may be rare, that doesn’t mean that it’s a hazard that should be ignored.
What I’ve never heard associated with wolves is a weasel or feral dog style attack on livestock - where the predator goes through a group of domestic animals in a killing frenzy, often killing far more than the predator can even hope to eat or carry off, or even cache. Not wolves, per se, but I recall that Hope Ryden’s God’s Dog about coyotes made the same point that the incidents she’d investigated were done by either feral dogs or coy-dog hybrids.
Of course, it has to be admitted that both Ryden and Mowat are firm advocates for their wild canines. Selection bias on their data may be playing a part.
ETA: It’s also worth noting that a wolf attack on a subsistence farm that destroyed a substantial fraction of it’s herd, in pre-industrial times could be fatal to the farm’s residents, without being a direct attack on the farm residents.
It’s also worth noting that, even today, wild animals such as bears still occasionally snatch human young (in the Catskills, in recent years). All you would need would be one of these per generation, plus the aforementioned livestock poaching, to keep the fear and animosity alive.
Another thing to keep in mind is that wolves going after livestock* might attack humans if the humans were trying to drive the wolves away, which they’d probably try to do if they saw the wolves.
*livestock like sheep and cattle would be much more similar to typical wolf prey than a human would. And although some wolf packs seem to specialize in certain prey animals, they are pretty opportunistic as well.
Another thing to consider is that the OP is asking about pre-industrial attacks. By now, wolves have learned a healthy fear of humans. Would they have been so cautious before we armed ourselves with guns?
Those “big bad wolf” stories had to come from somewhere, no?
spoke-, I can’t prove it, but I suspect that the modern instinctual fear of humans that most large predators exhibit dates more to the shift from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. With the larger populations that people could support with fixed agriculture, it seems that would be when vengeful parties would go hunting after the brave (vice timid, modern behaving) wolves.
Or, to put it another way - I don’t think that the 400 years of gun history is enough to account for the near universal timidity that healthy large predators have towards humans.
Wolves killing children makes sense as a source of Little-Red-Riding-Hood-type stories.
I have seen it suggested elsewhere that wolves may have been common scapegoats for murder in preindustrial times. (And that scapegoating was probably helped along by wolves scavenging human corpses.)
This is especially true for sheep, because a dog/wolf/whatever can chase a sheep until it drops from exhaustion, or the sheep will keep running even after the dog/whatever is gone and then drop from exhaustion. So even if the dog-things only take down one sheep out of the herd, it can upset the rest of the herd enough for more of them to die.
Coyote are becoming a growing problem across the country, as well. We lost a calf to a coyote pack last summer, which is the first time that had happened in decades.
I think seeing half a herd of sheep dead in a field, a couple of them torn to shreds, would be enough for people to start making up big, bad wolf stories. But there is a long tradition of wolf attacks in Europe, both before and after the introduction of firearms. The Wikipedia article on wolf attacks is actually well cited, and has a listing of attacks, from pre-1700 to the modern day. There are fewer wolf attacks in North America just because the population density isn’t so high and there’s less infringement on the wolf’s natural habitat. However, the wolf population is a lot smaller than it was in the 19th century and the human population is a lot larger, so I suppose time will only tell if wolf predation on humans will become an issue with them being removed from the endangered species list in some states.
Anecdote: my Mom & Stepdad ran a ranch for many years, and you could hear coyotes every night. They were never even once a problem. Dogs, however - a number of these got shot for attempted (sometimes even successful!) raids.
One thing to keep in mind is that the European wolf is larger than its North American cousin. With all those fairy tales of ravening wolves, there has to to be a grain of truth in there, however small. You don’t hear any stories of fearsome foxes (unless you’re a chicken).