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I was camping at around 1500m in the Italian Alps, and around midnight I heard howling that sounded very much like a wolf.
I know there are wolves in the area (a friend of mine was lucky enough to see one), but they are rare. On the other hand, the shepherds in the high pastures often use large dogs to protect their flocks at night.
Is there any way to differentiate between the howling of a wolf vs a large dog?
The answer is yes, but it may require equipment, which is not just the human ear. The publication quoted below is from Montana State University Disentangling canid howls across multiple species and subspecies: Structure in a complex communication channel. (It is not clear whether this work is part of the Canid Howl Project which welcomes contributions of howls and analysis from non-scientists.) This work identified 21 howl types and
analysed a database of over 2,000 howls recorded from 13 different canid species and subspecies.........[They] found that different species and subspecies showed markedly different use of howl types, indicating that howl modulation is not arbitrary, but can be used to distinguish one population from another.
This requires equipment. They did note one qualitative trend, which may be noticeable by the human ear, although I don't think they said that explicitly:
One qualitative trend noticeable from the exemplar 209 howls (chosen as those nearest to the cluster centroid) is that the smaller species (red wolf, coyote, New Guinea singing dog, domestic dog, golden jackal) favoured howls that ended with a sharp drop in frequency, whereas larger species (arctic wolf, eastern timber wolf, European wolf, Mackenzie Valley wolf) used howls with much less frequency modulation, particularly at the end of the howl (Figure 4), although this may be an artifact of the lower fundamental frequency used by larger species.
For the purposes of the OP, an answer that comes from personal experience, using nothing but the human ear, would be more useful.
