In their natural habitat with ample wild prey, North American wolves avoid contact with humans. There’s also some speculation that avoiding humans is a fairly new survival behavior — an evolutionary adaptation to the mass slaughter of wolves in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yes, there are a lot of human visitors to Yellowstone National Park but park staff “manage” any wolf that gets too acclimated to tourists. In fact, there have been no wolf attacks in the park since wolf reintroduction. Most park tourists only see wolves through powerful viewing scopes wielded by dedicated, early-rising wolf watchers. The wolves, of course, mostly have no idea they are being watched and go about their lives.
However, WolfQuest does include signs of people including:
- a cattle ranch, accessed in single player from the Slough Creek map.
- human signs, objects, and impacts scattered throughout the Amethyst Mountain and Slough Creek maps.
- the Lost River map, which is a fictional abandoned, post disaster area, that we made just for kicks.
The Cattle Ranch
We included a cattle ranch in the game because we wanted to recognize that, given easy access to docile, domestic farm animals, wolves may prey on cows and the like. However, it should be noted that there actually are no real-life cattle ranches anywhere near the areas of Yellowstone National Park that are represented in the game. So real wild wolves living in Amethyst Mountain and Slough Creek areas would have to travel a very long way to find any domestic cows to hunt. Since ungulates are plentiful, the real Yellowstone wolf packs tend to stay put.
Where is the WolfQuest Cattle Ranch in the game? The fictional cattle ranch is an optional zone in Slough Creek. You won’t be able to access it from any other map, and it is only available in single player. On the compass, after your pups have been born, you’ll see a barbed wire fence icon . This will take you to the north-eastern side of the creek, just above the words ‘Slough Creek’ on the map.
If food becomes scarce or if you’d like to hunt something other than hare and elk, you can visit this area to prey upon livestock at night. The objective here is to locate the calf – you’ll want to avoid adult cows, otherwise you’ll be chased! – and kill the calf. While it provides food for yourself and your pups, it is not without its consequences if you overstay your welcome! Caution must be taken to ensure survival, or else players risk dying to a bullet fired by the (unseen) ranch owner in an effort to protect their livestock, which mirrors the same protective measures that actually occur in real life.
For more details and hints about the cattle ranch go to the WolfQuest Wiki page on the Cattle Ranch
Human-Related Impacts
Amethyst Mountain, Slough Creek and Lost River maps feature an assortment of human Impacts consisting of a collection of various man-made objects and indicators of human presence that are scattered throughout each game map. There are two in the first map, seven in the second map and more than twelve in the new fictional map, Lost River. These can be found in single player and multiplayer.
For more details about human impacts in the game visit the WolfQuest Wiki page on Human Impacts.