The national animal of Turkey is the gray wolf. The gray wolf has been an important Turkic symbol for centuries, and is a sacred and revered national animal. Many Turks believe the Turkic people to be descended ultimately from a gray wolf, whether literally or metaphorically, so it’s a very important part of national culture.
The gray wolf, then, is one of the most iconic Turkic animals and so it makes sense as the country’s national animal.
Gray wolves are very common in Turkey and can be found throughout the country, though their numbers are certainly lesser than they once were.
Let’s find out more.
What is the national animal of Turkey?
The national animal of Turkey is the gray wolf.
This is by no means a recent thing; the gray wolf has been revered and respected as a vital national symbol throughout Turkey’s history.
There are many reasons why the gray wolf is considered so important to Turkish people which I will get into shortly, but for now, let’s just consider the animal itself.
The gray wolf is more or less synonymous, at least in Western minds, with “wolves” in general.
This is usually the animal people are imagining when they think of wolves.
Most other canines are jackals, coyotes or wild dogs, though there is also the African wolf and the Ethiopian wolf.
With that said, as many as 30 gray wolf subspecies have been officially recognized, and they are native to both North America and Eurasia.
They are the largest living members of their family, usually with mottled gray, brown and black fur in white.
Many arctic wolves, though, are completely white.
They are highly specialized and adapted to cooperative game hunting.
They will lead endurance hunts in large packs where the aim is generally to exhaust their prey by a long chase so that they can then pounce on them.
With that said, pairs or individual wolves tend to have better success in hunting than large packs do.
They are highly social animals, with advanced expressive behavior like group howling.
They generally travel in nuclear families, though also in larger packs with multiple mated pairs.
They are, understandably, mostly carnivores, hunting large-hooved mammals and sometimes carrion.
They were first distinguished taxonomically in 1758, though naturally, they have haunted the imaginations of people across the world since time began.
In Turkey in particular they have played a very specific and important role in the country’s history—so let’s look into that.
Why is the wolf the national animal of Turkey?
There are many reasons wolves are significant mythologically to the Turkic people.
The origin story of the wolf Asena is part of the story of not only all Turkic peoples but Mongolian peoples too.
The she-wolf finds a young boy who survives a battle, then nurses the child back to health; that wolf then escapes her enemies and gives birth to ten half-wolf, half-humans.
Their leader establishes the Turkic nomadic empires beginning with the Ashina clan.
So, wolves play a very specific role in Turkish national identity and mythology.
Most simply take this as a story and not something literally true, of course, but nonetheless, the sense of shared ancestry fostered with this animal is of vital importance to Turkish nationality.
The wolf represents war, the spirit of freedom, as well as speed and nature.
Wolves appear to guide humans at times of threat and strife.
Carrying a wolf tooth in one’s pocket is supposed to protect you from the evil eye.
So, importantly, though the gray wolf is the official national animal of Turkey, the gray wolf is of huge importance to Turkic people more broadly and that’s really vital to remember.
Are gray wolves aggressive?
Generally speaking, aggression from wolves towards people is not very common.
They prefer to keep their distance from people where possible and aren’t generally given to encroaching on human territory.
Wolves are not, really, aggressive to people in general.
This is of course not a hard and fast rule, and a gray wolf if cornered is of course going to defend itself.
The likelihood, though, that you would ever really be able to corner a gray wolf in the wild is very low.
They are extremely fast and elusive, so they would likely have run away before you ever saw them to begin with.
Did gray wolves go extinct?
Gray wolves did not go extinct, though they were certainly pushed to the brink in certain areas.
They are found all over Europe and there is a population of around 7,000 in Turkey.
They are generally found in the center, the north, and the east of Anatolia, away from the coast, and usually not at altitudes below 900 meters.
In various parts of the world, they have been hunted close to extinction, particularly in North America, though they have since bounced back.
Wolves, then, are well-established across Eurasia and are not going anywhere anytime soon.
So, while they came close to extinction in only the recent past, the gray wolf has returned and bounced back enormously in Turkey and other places.
This vital national symbol represents a great deal about Turkey and its people and the country would no doubt feel poorer had the wolves not survived human hunting.
There are many things that wolves symbolize to the Turkish people, not least of which is their own symbolic ancestry.