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The wolf (Canis lupus). There has never been another species to whom humanity has been unkinder. Leaving aside the indigenous cultures of North America and Eurasia, the wolf has always been viewed in a negative light, especially in European and European-derived cultural communities.
Similar to Europe, the wolf has had a tempestuous relationship with people of the Iranosphere as well. But first, a few facts on the wolf in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Morphometric variations of the skull in the Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) in Iran (2012), authors R Khosravi, M Kaboli, J Imani and E Nouran write that there are more than one types of wolf in Iran.
“Wolves in Iran are considered one (Mech and Boitani2004) or two subspecies (International Wolf Center (2012) http://www.wolf.org), with populations in the south Caspian region belonging to the Caucasian sub-species (C. lupus cubanensis), populations in the north-east belonging to European subspecies (C. lupus lupus) of Europe, and wolves in other regions of Iran belonging to the Indian/Iranian subspecies, C. lupus pallipes,” they note.
At least one historical region of Iran is named after the wolf.
‘Hyrcania’ was a region of ancient Persia well-known in the ancient world. It lay immediately south of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water.
The region can be described as Persia/Iran’s very own ‘cloud forest’.
In Biodiversity of the Hyrcanian Forests: A synthesis report (2016), Mohammad Tohidifar et al write that, “The remarkable Hyrcanian Forests only exist because of the mass of water vapours that evaporate from the Caspian Sea. When these confront the Alborz massif, it acts as a climatic wall, producing dense clouds and discharges of rain or snow; this, in turn, creates a very dense forest on the northern slope of the Alborz mountains, while the southern slopes end in the Kavir desert, one of the driest deserts in the world.”
Today, the Hyrcanian forests stretch from Azerbaijan in the west to the vicinity of Gorgan in the northeast of Iran. Three Iranian provinces — Gilan, Mazandaran and Golestan (where Gorgan is) — are home to these unique forests. ‘Gorgan’ is derived from an ancient Persian term meaning ‘Wolf Land’ (the wolf is today known in Persian or Farsi as gurg), which became known to the Greeks as ‘Hyrcania’.
Indeed, these forests are still home large predators like the Persian leopard, brown bear and wolf, in addition to herbivores like red deer and roe deer.
According to The International Wolf Center, a research and educational organisation based near Ely, Minnesota, United States focused on wolves and their ecology, Iran has more than 1,000 wolves.
But the picture for the species is not rosy in Iran. In Assessment of habitat fragmentation for grey wolf and Persian leopard in some Iranian desert landscapes (2025), Kamran Almasieh & Alireza Mohammadi note, “However, in recent years, the wolf population in many regions of Iran has significantly declined due to reduced prey availability and conflicts with humans stemming from attacks on livestock and people, with some areas experiencing complete extinction.”
The decline of the gray wolf in Iran must be seen through the lens of its ancient Zoroastrian ethos. For Zoroastrians, the wolf was an ‘evil animal’.
Perhaps the best commentary on the wolf and its place in ancient Iran comes from Mahnaz Moazami’s brilliant 2005 article, Evil Animals in the Zoroastrian religion (2005).
According to her, Zoroastrian attitudes towards all animals were shaped by the faith’s emphasis on ‘dualism’.
“Dualism is the most characteristic element of the Zoroastrian religion, and dualism affected all aspects of Iranian civilization, especially during the Sasanian period (224-651 CE). The religious thought of Zarathustra is based on oppositions between good and evil, order and chaos, light and darkness, and life and death. All that is good arises from the creativity of the Beneficent Spirit (Ohrmazd), and all evil comes from the Evil Spirit (Ahriman). In the ninth-century Pahlavi books, this dualism is omnipresent. Good and evil forces are presented in an almost perfect symmetry, and for each good creature a symmetrical evil corresponds. The animal world is likewise divided between “beneficial” animals, creatures of the Beneficent Spirit, and “maleficent” animals, creatures of the Evil Spirit. The partition of animals as beneficial or maleficent represents one of the most important and original aspects of the ancient Iranian religious worldview,” she writes.
According to Zoroastrian dualistic principles, the wolf is a Xrafstar, an ‘evil animal’.
Moazami observes that “among wild animals created by the Evil Spirit, the wolf appears to have a close relation with the Evil Spirit and demons. It is always described as distorted and satirical, with an excess of negative values: the Evil Spirit produced the thievish wolf, small and worthy of darkness, offspring of darkness, of obscure stock, of black body, biting, without hair, and sterile.”
She adds that the species “represents the wild state of life and is the emblematic enemy who acts without regard to the rules of civil society. It is engaged in a cruel and merciless battle against the domestic species whose reproduction is controlled by humans—the typical opposition is between the wolf and the sheep, that is, the dichotomy between wild and domestic states.”
The wolf, writes the scholar, was often seen as the exemplary enemy of Iranians. “To kill wolves was an act of great merit. A mythic tradition states that Zarathustra was killed by a Turanian, Tur i BradréS, who had the manner of a wolf. The wolf also appears as a devourer of cadavers in the Zoroastrian literature; it is among the carrion eaters beside birds and dogs. However, its presence in the domain of death may be derived simply from the fear that its carnivorous figure inspired.”
The animal even appears in Zoroastrian eschatology. Moazami writes how as per the faith’s worldview, “the duration of the world is conceived as a sort of cosmic year, consisting of 12,000 calendar years divided into four periods of 3,000 years each, and it is in the fourth and last period that the Evil Spirit and its creatures will be powerless and unable to do harm to other creatures. Descendents of Zarathustra will be born at each of the three millennia through his semen, miraculously preserved in Lake Kasaoiia. It is in the beginning of the millennium of Ušēdar, the first savior, that the shape of the wolves will be destroyed.”
The animosity towards the wolf in Iran did not stop even after the civilisation embraced Islam. In Interpretation of Images of the Animal World and Their Functions in Iranian Folk Tales (2023), U A Umarov, writes that, “The wolf is one of the main participants among animals in the system of Iranian epic works, according to the image of the wolf in Iranian folk tales… Even in Firdausi’s Shahnama, the image of the wolf is frequently interpreted negatively.”
In most Iranian folk tales, writes Umarov, the wolf is traditionally portrayed as greedy and angry. “Because the wolf is not intelligent and lacks an independent mind, he is frequently duped by other characters in fairy tales, such as the fox. Many fairy tales feature the juxtaposition of these two powerful animals. The wolf’s personality is presented in the adjectives in almost all of these plots.”
In conclusion, the relationship between wolves and the Iranian people is ancient and has not always been healthy. It is emblematic of the everlasting influence of Zoroastrianism on Iran. The faith system may have diminished in Iran, but its beliefs still find an echo as far as the wolf is concerned.
As Moazami writes, “Long before contemporary efforts to exterminate wolves, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and prairie dogs, Zoroastrians were invested in a selective extermination role that remained until recently a mark of the beliefs inherited from ancient Iran.”