![]() Unfortunately, biologists did not have good information on wolf genetics during the early 1990s when the decision was made to reintroduce wolves to Wyoming and Idaho from Alberta and British Columbia. It is currently being reintroduced from captive animals into northern Arizona and New Mexico. The third subspecies of wolf in western North America, the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), is the only subspecies that was ever truly endangered, having died out in the wild in Sonora in the 1970s. The northwestern wolf evolved in northeast Asia and Beringia during the Wisconsin Glaciation, while smaller subspecies of wolves developed south of the ice sheets. This wolf has always been common and its distribution has never been appreciably affected by human activity. Although it was completely eliminated from the western United States by the late 1920s (except for a handful in the Cascades until the early 1940s), it continued to exist in healthy numbers in southwestern Canada and southeastern Alaska.Ī considerably larger northwestern wolf (Canis lupus occidentalis) occupied northern Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon, and the rest of Alaska. The original common name for this relatively small wolf was “plains” wolf because it was first encountered by Europeans on the Great Plains. These researchers support the view that only three subspecies of wolves should be recognized in western North America and that a single subspecies (Canis lupus nubilus) inhabited all of the western states north of Arizona and New Mexico, and southern Alberta, southern British Columbia and Southeast Alaska. Fain, Bud Fazio, and Michael Amaral) with the US Fish and Wildlife Service completed an extensive review of wolves in North America – the third comprehensive review since 1944. Within the last several months, using newly available genetic information in addition to existing morphometric data, research biologists (Steven M. Perhaps more importantly, if the introduced wolf is a larger subspecies, are they more likely to kill livestock and working dogs or to kill more deer and elk than the original subspecies? So, what is the truth about these “Canadian” wolves? Are they really larger than the original wolf that used to roam the western states, and if so, how much larger are they? Pictures of very large wolves taken during the Idaho hunting season have appeared on the Internet, but some people suspect the photos have been digitally enhanced to make the wolves appear larger than they actually are. To perhaps have brought back a possibly larger subspecies that was never here to begin with (the “Canadian” wolf) has added fuel to the controversy. To many people in rural areas of the West, bringing wolves back was a bad idea. ![]()
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