Why are young wolves called cubs instead of pups?

personally, i think pup is better for a baby wolf. in the US, maybe the use of cub has been popularized through Boy Scouts, which based its Cub program on Kipling’s The Jungle Book. i assume that maybe British folks have a more expansive view of cubs, since it looks like the Oxford dictionary explicitly applies cubs to both wolves and seals, whereas i would call both of these pups in the US.

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