Why Do Wolves Lick Each Other’s Faces?

What muzzle licking means in wolves, and why your dog may be doing something surprisingly similar

Watch a group of wolves reunite and one behavior is hard to miss. One animal approaches another, ears pulled back, tail moving, body bending and twisting with excitement, and begins licking rapidly around the other wolf’s mouth and muzzle.

To human eyes, it can look almost like kissing.

But wolf face licking has a much deeper history. It can be part of a greeting, a way of maintaining social relationships, a signal that reduces tension, or a request for food. The same basic behavior also appears in domestic dogs, although thousands of years of domestication have changed where, when, and toward whom dogs use it.

The important point is that a lick does not have one translation. To understand what it means, you have to look at the animal doing it, the animal receiving it, and everything else happening at the same time.

Quick rule before you start

Never interpret a wolf’s face lick by itself.

Wolf behavior is built from combinations of:

• Posture
• Movement
• Facial expression
• Tail position
• Ear position
• Vocalization
• Context

The International Wolf Center’s wolf ethogram places licking in several behavioral contexts, including social grooming, greeting, and food begging.

The same tongue can mean very different things:

• A lick accompanied by loose movement and enthusiastic tail wagging may be part of a friendly reunion.
• Persistent muzzle licking from a crouched wolf with a tucked tail can occur during active submission.
• A group of hungry pups mobbing an adult’s mouth after it returns from a kill is something else again.

Same tongue. Very different conversation.

Face licking starts with food

One of the clearest explanations for muzzle licking begins when wolves are pups.

Young wolves cannot travel with the pack to distant kills when they are very small. Instead, adults return to den and rendezvous areas carrying food internally. Pups rush toward them and vigorously lick and mouth around the adults’ muzzles. That solicitation can trigger the adult to regurgitate partially digested food.

This is not a minor part of wolf family life. A long-term study of wild wolves on Ellesmere Island documented adults transferring food through regurgitation, with pups receiving the great majority of observed transfers. Adults other than the breeding parents also participated, showing how food provisioning can extend across the family group.

More recent research on wolf provisioning describes pups crowding returning adults and licking around their mouths, which can trigger regurgitation. As pups become old enough to travel to kills themselves, that particular nutritional role becomes less important.

So one of the behaviors that later becomes part of wolf social communication begins with a very practical message:

Did you bring food?

The behavior does not disappear when puppyhood ends

Muzzle licking does not simply vanish once wolves can eat at a carcass.

Elements of the behavior remain part of adult social interactions. Wolves may lick around the face during greetings, particularly when pack members reunite after being separated. Wolf ethograms describe greeting sequences that can include:

• Tail wagging
• Facial contact
• Rubbing
• Soft muzzle contact
• Licking

That does not necessarily mean the wolf is consciously remembering being fed as a pup. Behaviors can change function as animals mature. A movement that begins in one developmental context can become incorporated into the adult social vocabulary.

This makes muzzle licking an especially interesting example of how wolf communication grows out of family life.

Sometimes it really is a friendly greeting

A wolf returning to the group may receive an extraordinarily enthusiastic welcome. Pack members can:

• Crowd around
• Wag their tails
• Whine
• Rub against one another
• Make repeated contact with the face and muzzle

Research describing greeting behavior in captive Arctic wolves distinguished a relaxed greeting from more clearly submissive behavior. Friendly greetings could include ears held back, considerable tail wagging, and licking around the other wolf’s mouth or muzzle without the pronounced crouching and tucked tail seen during active submission.

This distinction is useful because people sometimes see any wolf licking another wolf’s face and immediately label it “submission.”

That is too simple.

Sometimes the interaction appears better described as affiliation: maintaining contact with a familiar family member and reinforcing the social relationship.

If a human family hugs someone arriving home, the hug does not have to mean exactly one thing. It can contain recognition, excitement, reassurance, and affection at the same time. We should not project that human emotional experience directly onto wolves, but the comparison illustrates why trying to give every lick a single rigid definition does not work.

Sometimes licking does help reduce tension

There is another version of muzzle licking that looks different.

A wolf may lower its body, hold its ears back, lower or tuck its tail, approach another animal carefully, and lick repeatedly around that wolf’s muzzle. Wolf behavior literature traditionally calls this active submission.

The International Wolf Center describes active submission as involving behaviors such as:

• Crouching
• Muzzle licking
• Tail tucking

The organization also notes that these behaviors first appear in pups in connection with food solicitation and are retained in adult social interactions.

A study of Arctic wolves similarly distinguished active submission from ordinary greeting by the surrounding posture:

• During active submission, the animal could crouch, tuck the tail, paw at the other wolf, and lick around the muzzle.
• During a relaxed greeting, muzzle licking could occur without that strongly lowered posture.

That distinction matters.

The lick itself does not tell you whether you are watching affiliation or deference. The rest of the body does.

“Submission” does not mean wolves spend their lives fighting for dominance

The word submission can also create the wrong image.

Wolf packs in the wild are usually family groups rather than random collections of adults permanently fighting to become “alpha.” Parents, offspring of different ages, and occasionally other individuals live together within a social system shaped by age, reproduction, experience, and family relationships.

Submissive or appeasing behaviors can therefore be understood partly as ways of managing everyday social interactions. A younger or less assertive animal can communicate in ways that reduce pressure and help prevent an encounter from escalating.

A muzzle lick can be part of that negotiation.

In other words, submission is not necessarily defeat. In a social animal, knowing how to de-escalate can be extremely useful.

So is face licking affection?

Sometimes the better word is affiliation.

“Affection” describes an internal emotional state, and we cannot simply ask a wolf how it feels. Affiliation is easier to observe. Animals:

• Seek one another out
• Remain close
• Greet one another
• Rest together
• Groom one another
• Play
• Repeatedly maintain social contact

Licking can occur within those interactions. The International Wolf Center includes licking in both social grooming and greeting contexts, and observational wolf ethograms include licking among the behaviors seen in greeting sequences.

That means it is reasonable to describe some face licking as affiliative behavior.

Calling every lick a “kiss,” however, would be going too far.

Dogs inherited much of the same canid toolkit

Now look at a domestic dog greeting another dog. You may see:

• Ears pulled back
• Rapid tail wagging
• Body lowering
• Muzzle contact
• Licking around the mouth
• Excited movement

Much of that looks remarkably familiar because wolves and dogs share an evolutionary heritage.

Domestic dog puppies also show mouth-directed licking behavior associated with food solicitation, and licking or lip-licking remains part of later canine social behavior. Research on dog communication has found licking-related behaviors in greeting and appeasement contexts, although the meaning depends strongly on what else the dog is doing.

This is where dogs and wolves begin to diverge in an interesting way.

For wolves, their most important social world is overwhelmingly another wolf world. For domestic dogs, humans became central social partners.

Domestication changed the audience.

Why does your dog lick your face?

When a dog enthusiastically licks a human around the mouth or face, part of what you are seeing may come from this inherited canid behavioral repertoire. But a pet dog is living in a completely different environment from a wolf pup approaching an adult returning from a kill.

Dogs can lick people during:

• Greetings
• Friendly interaction
• Appeasement
• Investigation
• Attention-seeking

Human skin also contains interesting smells and tastes from food, sweat, tears, and skin oils. Perhaps most importantly, dogs are excellent learners. If licking a person’s face reliably produces laughter, talking, petting, or attention, the behavior can become strongly reinforced.

So the popular idea that every lick means “I love you” is not quite right.

It may be friendly. It may happen in an affectionate relationship. But the behavior itself can have several motivations.

That is very similar to the wolf situation.

Dogs also use licking when situations feel uncertain

There is another reason to be cautious about calling every lick a kiss.

Studies of domestic dogs have found that lip and nose licking can occur during socially uncertain or conflict-related situations and may function as an appeasement signal. In one standardized study, dogs showed lip licking and looking away more frequently in some threatening or conflict-related interactions with unfamiliar people. Lip licking also appeared as part of dog-to-human greeting behavior.

Researchers continue to debate exactly how particular licking behaviors relate to communication, arousal, and stress, and the same behavior can appear in several contexts. A later study likewise emphasized that nose or lip licking should not automatically be assigned a single emotional meaning.

This gives us a useful lesson for reading both dogs and wolves:

• A dog licking while its body is loose, approaching willingly, in a relaxed interaction.
• A dog licking while turning its head away, lowering its body, pinning its ears, or trying to create distance.

That is a very different picture.

Context changes the message.

Wolf versus dog: the same behavior took different paths

Wolves preserve the behavior inside a social system built around family groups, cooperative pup care, territorial life, and interactions among other wolves. Face licking can connect food solicitation, greetings, affiliation, and de-escalation.

Dogs inherited much of that canid vocabulary, but domestication placed them in a new social environment. Humans became caregivers, food providers, companions, and communication partners. Dogs therefore use ancient canid behaviors in interactions their wolf ancestors never routinely experienced.

• A wolf pup licks an adult wolf’s mouth and may receive regurgitated meat.
• A dog licks a person’s mouth and may receive, instead, a laugh, a cuddle, or a reminder to stop licking.

The behavioral ancestry is connected. The modern context is very different.

The Big Idea

When wolves lick each other’s faces, we should resist searching for one neat translation. Muzzle licking can be part of:

• Food solicitation
• Greeting
• Affiliation
• Grooming
• A submissive and appeasing interaction

The meaning emerges from the entire social scene.

Dogs retained much of the same behavioral toolkit. But domestication expanded its use into relationships with humans, where learning and reinforcement can add new reasons for licking.

That is what makes the behavior so interesting. Something that begins around a wolf pup asking an adult for food can become part of the social language used throughout life, and traces of that language are still visible when a dog enthusiastically licks the face of the person who just walked through the door.

Same behavior. Shared ancestry. Different social worlds.