Not having seeing either for almost 2 weeks as I hang out in the city, this was a very weird experience. What was more weird is that it was occuring on a day where the EU servers were constantly restarting (18.09.2020), which started after the 1.09 patch.
I had one set of wolves on me prior to restart. I killed 3 out of 4. They kept coming to me in groups of 4 without howling on each restart of the server. I think they have a problem with the "lock on" mechanism and server restarts.