The way this statement usually reads is “There has never been a documented case of a healthy, wild wolf attacking a human in North America.” As astro and others have pointed out, health captive wolves can be extremely dangerous. And it goes without saying that if an animal has rabies, all bets are off.
Regardless, this statement doesn’t mean that healthy, wild wolves aren’t dangerous. If you get between a wolf and its pups or encroach on a kill, you can expect some aggression. But attacks by wild wolves on humans in North America are exceedingly rare, if they happen at all, in part because wolf-human encounters in the wild are themselves quite rare. The above statement is probably true, provided you keep fairly strict definitions of “wild” and “documented.” The attacks on the caretaker in Minn. and the camper in B.C. were both by human-habituated wolves. Many “documented” wolf attacks are anecdotal accounts from unreliable sources or outright fabrications by wolf opponents, such as the ranching industry. This makes it difficult to identify genuine wolf-to-human aggression.
Finally, it is important to remember that wolves in India (Canis lupus pallipes) are a different subspecies from wolves in North America (Canis lupus lupus, Canis lupus rufus, and Canis lupus mexicanus). The European wolf is considerably more aggressive than the North American wolf, so some of the medieval stories about wolf attacks probably had some basis in fact. But when European settlers came to North America, they didn’t realize that they were dealing with a different subspecies, and transferred all their prejudices about the European wolf to the North American wolf. Many of our own stereotypes about the North American wolf descend from settler’s beliefs about the European wolf.
It looks like there was a significant amount of evidence posted to this thread, but none of the links work anymore because they’re all very old. Please note that all the posts to this thread before yours were made on July 14, 2000.
A place you can get up and personal with wolfs inside their enclosures. Swing by there sometime if you are driving down to see the Big Rat down in Floria. They aren’t that scary.
I realize this is a zombie, so perhaps no-one knows any more, but I was baffled by the “factoid” quoted in the OP:
I know “lupine” as an adjective, meaning wolflike, and as a flower, also spelled “lupin”. Neither of these seem likely to be capable of ravaging the land. So what is this “factoid” about?
If it is the flower, though, Denis Moore’s behavior becomes somewhat more understandable.