6. The Adult Wolf: Food Consumption, Digestion, and Waste
Many people ask how much red meat and intestinal fat it requires to sustain a wolf? Unfortunately, there is no absolute in this field and we must go to our captive and psychologically bonded packs. In arriving at an average of what the little Eastern Timber Wolf and the great Northern Arctos and Tundrarum Wolves will consume without waste or weight loss, it comes out to be 2 pounds 14 ounces each day.
True, a hungry wolf of the Great Northern Sub-Species can eat 12 to 14 pounds in one twenty-four hour period. One must take into consideration the fact that it might not eat another bite for three to five days.
Feeding of chicken or poultry parts, or beef parts, requirements may be more, but where the wolf is allowed to eat from the entire carcass, thus getting every element found in the wild killed carcass, 2 1/2 to 3 pounds is usually sufficient to hold weight and nutrition, except in unusual individual wolves.
The Wolf has a unique digestive system as opposed to the domesticated canine. They use very little bacteria in it and much more acids and enzymes, thus their need for meat. In fact the fecal matter from wolves and my high percentage hybrids has so much acid that it kills the action in the digestive compounds that are manufactured for fecal eliminators that the dog breeders use.
About the only fairly successful compound that I have found for digester systems is the same as the ones used in the treatment of confinement swine raising facilities, deep pits, sealed off, temperature kept at above 60 degrees. Even then one must use about twice the amount that is used for comparable numbers of two hundred pound hogs.
Though some GOOD dog food (dry) can be self fed to wolves, they must have nearly a pound of good processed horse meat each day. This horse meat is processed from old, sick and infirm horses, unfit for human use, thus every element as in the wild killed game.