Fairy Tales by the Numbers: The Big Bad Wolf

So I have here in front of me a list of stuff I want to talk about, as you do.  This thing covers faith, personal opinions about family, popular media, social issues…basically the only thing I don’t have is stuff on science, yet.

So where do I begin?  What’s the first thing I want to talk with you about?  What should our inaugural conversation be?

Well, I took a bunch of topics and put them into a hat.  It was a nice hat.  Okay, it was a coffee cup, but…never mind.  So our first topic of discussion:  Fairy Tales by the Numbers: The Big Bad Wolf

Fairy Tales by the Numbers will be an ongoing thing where in I look at a particular fairy tale character, this time being the Big Bad Wolf, and break down how this character or creature would work in the real world.  In case you don’t know, this is a wolf:

So what do we know about our character?  Let’s look at the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood.  On average, the gray wolf, which was dominant in Europe during the time the fairy tale became prevalent would weigh in at about 95 to 99 pounds.  The average wolf eats between 15 to 19% of its body weight in a single feeding.  This is because the wolf can’t guarantee when its next meal is going to be, so it needs that energy stored up just in case.  But that’s on average, and our wolf is declared “Big”, so let’s say he’s an even 100 pounds and can eat 20% of his body weight.  That’s 20 pounds of meat.

Yet in the course of the fairy tale proper, the wolf eats Red’s grandma, with eyes on eating Red once she comes sauntering in to the house.  So what do we know about this wolf’s prospective meals?

Grandma, a woman probably in her mid to late 50’s, because it’s the Middle Ages, who is also sickly.  Let’s put her at the average of 5’2” at about 90 pounds, which places her body mass index right at “severe thinness”, which would be accounted for because it’s the Middle Ages and she’s sick.  Now in most cases, all is fair game for a wolf’s lunch menu.  Flesh, organs, hair and bones can all be eaten and digested by our furry friend.  Originally I thought to exclude the bones, but that’s not terribly realistic (in a fairy tale?).  So yes, our fuzzy maniac busts into Grandma’s and gobbles up her full 90 sickly pounds.

So if 90 pounds is twenty percent of the wolf’s body weight…that places our wolf at 450 pounds!  Assuming that our wolf isn’t shaped like a beach ball, in order to have a frame accurately support a creature that regularly bounds around the forest hunting little girls, the wolf would have to be roughly 12 to 13 feet long!  That’s slightly shorter than a Volkswagon Beetle.

So what about Red Riding Hood?  Well how old do you think she’d be?  My estimate is probably somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 years old.  I’d shoot for 10 years old because that’s about how old you’d have to be before being trustworthy enough to wander a forest path to your grandma’s house.  We know it’s some distance, at the very least into a forest where her mother and father don’t have a clear line of sight of her because all the action of the story takes place without anyone else present or aware of the little girl’s danger.  This path she’s supposed to stay on takes her into some deep woods because a wolf can safely hide in them.  A wolf the size of a small passenger car, apparently.  So Red’s about ten years old, and healthy because she can make this little trek on her own without getting tired.  That places her at roughly 4 feet 6 inches at about 70 pounds.

This wolf, who just scarfed down a 90 pound grandma, is now gearing up to chow down on an additional 70 pounds.  That’s 160 pounds of food!  Now the wolf is described as gluttonous and in later versions of the story a woodsman finds the wolf swollen and unable to move, much like anyone who just tore up a buffet to “make it worth the price”.  So with this new information, we can assume that 20 % is to get the wolf full enough to function, 35% is just plain slovenly.  That boosts our wolf to a whopping 457 pounds, so we can still hold our initial length of 13ish feet.

Now I ask is this the same wolf that menaced our porcine heroes, the Three Little Pigs?  Well, let’s do the math.  A domestic pig weaned from its mother at 6 weeks old, and at fully grown, on the low end, can be 35 inches (almost three feet) at 110 pounds.  That is a little pig.  No, we will not be discussing “miniature pigs” because the very concept of such a creature did not enter into culture until the 1960’s and, as stated earlier, we are in the Middle Ages.

Cue our wolf, in this corner standing at 13 feet long and weighing in at roughly 450ish pounds, able to conservatively eat 90 pounds of food in a single sitting.  In our opposite corner, the three little pigs weighing in at a combined 330 pounds.  So we can break this down.

There are two accepted versions of this story.  In the first one, the wolf successfully eats the first two pigs before moving on to our third pig in the brick house, where he is ultimately defeated.

The second is the pigs flee the scenes of their destroyed homes and meet up with their brother in the brick house.  I think it’s reasonable that the first story is probably closer to reality with the wolf fully capable of chasing down and eating said pig.  We don’t even have to really worry about the wolf’s capacity for eating food since we’ve previously determined that it takes 160 pounds of food to make him too fat to move.  We can reasonably assume that he attacked the house of straw on day one, ate the pig, waited until he was hungry and then attacked the house of sticks.

But did he blow the house down?  Remember “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.”  Where did that come from?  Well the wolf does have a rather large lung capacity, as it is able to run farther than most other animals, and howl at a volume, length, and decibel capable of being heard throughout an entire forest. Yet even with this under our giant wolf’s belt, he’s still not going to be capable of gale force winds.

But he doesn’t need to be.

Let’s look at the forensics of the story.  Our first pig made his house out of straw.  Given how flimsy of a building material this is, we can assume this lazy swine didn’t bother with anything to make the straw any sturdier, like mud.  At best this porker can build a passable lean too out of hay.  Big enough to house a 2.9 foot pig, the lean too of straw was probably about six feet long and three feet high.  How much force do you really need to clear that much straw?  When the wolf says he “huffs and puffs and blows” he probably means taking deep breaths as he bum rushes the house.  This first pig is easy pickings.

Our second pig, equally lazy but a little more discerning with his building material chose sticks.  Again, depending on how lazy, he probably didn’t use any other building material, but for once, let’s give him the benefit of a doubt and say he used mud to fasten together a very crude structure.  Again, for a 450+ pound wolf, this structure would not pose an obstacle.  Figure again that is six feet wide, four feet deep and three feet high.  Wolf builds up a little speed, rushes the door and it sure looks like he blew the house in, as the whole thing should collapse.

The third house made of brick, well that wasn’t going to happen.  Since our third pig is apparently very critical of his building supplies, he was prepared with this sturdy home capable of warding off even the absurdly large wolf.

In conclusion, what do we know of our subject?  He’s big, larger than most bears of that area, but lean enough to maintain his wolf agility.  He’s bad, openly deceiving a little girl with the intent of savagely murdering both her and the girl’s sick grandma, not to mention breaking and entering with intent to committee a felony (porcine-cide?).  All his characteristics mesh pretty well with what we know about wolves.

And that’s the Big Bad Wolf by the Numbers.

Thoughts, questions, comments, let me know below.

The photograph is used in accordance with public domain.