Which animal is a group of wolves?

A pack, and the word carries a great deal of baggage that turns out to be wrong. A wild wolf pack is almost always a family: a breeding pair and their offspring from the last few years, who leave as they mature. It is a household, not a gang.

The idea of the alpha wolf fighting its way to the top came from a 1940s study of unrelated captive wolves thrown together in a zoo enclosure - animals in a situation no wolf would ever be in, behaving accordingly. David Mech, who popularised the term in a 1970 book, spent decades afterwards trying to retract it and asked his own publisher to stop printing the book. The correction has never caught up with the vocabulary, and alpha and beta are now firmly lodged in human self-help writing on the strength of a misreading of some stressed captive animals.

What packs actually do is coordinate. Hunting animals many times a wolf's weight requires several individuals working in relay over long distances, and the young stay on partly to learn how. Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 changed where elk grazed, which let willow and aspen recover along the rivers, which brought back beavers and songbirds - though the tidiest versions of that story, in which wolves reshaped the rivers themselves, overstate what the data show.