THE PACK Message Boards

outwarddoodles wrote:I personally let it play out in my mind.
Lets take 6 bitten werewolves, they get in pair and create two more werewolves.
The offspring of born werewolves then are able to get in pairs again without inbreeding, and lets say they once again create two pups each pair.
After that new werewolves would need to be brought in because the werwolves could not mate with anyone of their own generation and not inbreed.
Yet that that point that would create 6 bitten to 12 born. A 1 to 2 ratio.

Well that's also assuming that they all want to have children, and that the ratio between the sexes is equal. It's not going to happen that way if you have 6 werewolves, and 4 are male and two are female.

Of cource, also on the other hand. Alphas are the only ones that mate, and I doubt that werewolves are all going to be pairing up to have babies as much as they can. A lot may want to skip taking care of babies because they may be too hard to take care of.

Well in the wild that's because only the alphas have the resources and the social freedom necessary to breed and sucessfully riase the pups. When food is plentiful other wolves in the pack may breed and produce offspring as well.

while i think that bitten and born wwolves would be equal, i don't think that bitten wws would get all the abilities that a born ww would get like longer than human lifespan

You sort of have to think in terms of the number of humans are bitten per year vs the number of werewolves born per year in a specific area. A werewolf can't be biting people left and right because that's how you get caught. A werewolf thirsty for human blood might do just that anyway, but they're more likely to leave a score of corpses than new werewolves I'd think.

But werewolves still need to increase their numbers when they begin to dwindle. The more familiar method of bringing new life into the world might serve just fine in that respect, assuming werewolf packs aren't hindered by the alpha breeding rule found in normal wolf packs. It's probably easier these days to keep the werewolf population stable this way especially with wolves protected and not many people have torches and pitchforks lying around anymore. A werewolf pack is like a family right? It's not like you need a new brother or sister or cousin every year. I think the only time when the bitten outnumber the born is in periods of decline when they're being hunted or infected with some werewolf specific plague or something (do werewolves have those?).

CrewWolf wrote:Y The more familiar method of bringing new life into the world might serve just fine in that respect, assuming werewolf packs aren't hindered by the alpha breeding rule found in normal wolf packs. It's probably easier these days to keep the werewolf population stable this way especially with wolves protected and not many people have torches and pitchforks lying around anymore.

The alpha breeding rule doesn't even apply in regular wolf packs all of the time. It's just that the offspring of the alpha pair tend to have the highest chance of successfully reaching adulthood.

I know. It's just easier to just say "alpha breeding rule found in normal wolf packs" instead of "alpha breeding rule found in normal wolf packs but is not entirely explicit in all packs really." But I think I made the effort to say it's not in all packs.

One thought to saying that there would be more born werewolves than bitten is that a pack rule might be that if a pack member bites/infects a non-werewolf, therefore turning that person into a were, the newly bitten were is the responcibility of the pack member that bit them, and if the newly bitten were causes trouble, the pack member responcible for that bitten were might get punished more harshly than the new werewolf causing the trouble for allowing it to happen

If a werewolf pack would be anything like a wolf pack, the number of born werewolves would be much higher than ones bitten.

Although some pack's might be entirely consistant of bitten ones.

I disagree with the idea that the alpha pair would have more children, or that their children would be more likely to survive. I don't think this rule should apply in any way to werewolf packs. These people are more human than wolf anyway, IMO, and you don't really see any parallels to that in most modern human society.