This 9-minute video clip was filmed by Dean Cluff, in collaboration with wolf biologist Dave Mech. The caption on Youtube reads:
An adult male wolf we radio-collared in the arctic near Eureka, Nunavut, Canada in July 2009 displayed continued dominance aggression on a younger male wolf, believed to be one of his offspring from a previous year. We suspect the behavior of the collared wolf represents domination on the part of a parent toward a maturing offspring that will eventually lead to the dispersal of that offspring. Filmed by Dean Cluff, in collaboration with Dave Mech.
You will note that this is the same David Mech who wrote a paper that the Cesar Millan-bashers are only too happy to routinely misrepresent. In fact, Mech has always been clear that dominance does occur in wolf packs. In fact, dominance creates and shapes wolf packs, from beginning to end, as older dominant males drive out younger males at age one or two.
Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot, the American environmental movement, the Lacey Act, the Weeks Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Pittman-Roberts Act, the Conservations Reserve Program, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Duck Stamp Act (to name just a few), America's wildlife is coming back.
All of this legislation has been supported by hunters who understood the value of the land and the wildlife on it. Environmentalists and hunter-anglers have worked hand-in-hand to bring back the wild turkey, to protect bear habitat, to preserve salmon spawning streams, and to shelter riparian areas.
For the terrier enthusiast, the result is plain to see in the hedgerow and forest: a record number of red fox, raccoon, possum and groundhogs spreading out into historically new territory.
Even species once pushed to the edge of extinction are now roaring back from the abyss -- alligators, bald eagles, beaver, Canada geese, wolves, and buffalo.
If the story of 19th Century America was about stripping the land and exterminating every species on it, the story of the 20th Century has been about bringing it all back.
Where the Buffalo Roam -- Again San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2001
________________
Brian Meirs first noticed it a few years ago. The game was coming back.
It was subtle in the beginning - a few more sharp-tailed grouse along the section roads than usual, more deer peering from the margins of the hayfields at night. Then people started noticing there were larger numbers of pronghorn antelope than had ever been seen, and they were hanging around closer to town.
"Even 10 years ago, you never heard of mountain lion or elk around here," said Meirs, a state game warden who works the vast plains and mesa country around Buffalo. "Now they're pretty common. There are even occasional wolf sightings. It's like the wildlife was back there in the shadows, waiting for a change."
The change has been building for decades. The western Great Plains contain the country's greatest demographic anomaly: Its human population is emptying out. The trend, the 2000 census shows, has really gained force over the past decade with the drying up of the ranching economy.
But as people move away, wildlife is starting to fill the vacuum. In an unexpected way, a vision of the Great Plains as a wild commons is taking hold.
"It's funny - Buffalo Commons is really happening," Meirs said, as he sat in his truck on the main drag of Buffalo, a thoroughfare framed by abandoned storefronts. "Not like people thought it would. But it's happening."
The concept of the Buffalo Commons was floated by New Jersey sociologists Frank and Deborah Popper in 1988. The Poppers observed that agriculture had failed miserably on the Great Plains, and noted that the region would probably be almost wholly depopulated save for a few cities by the mid-21st century.
The highest and best use for the area, the Poppers argued, was in its pristine state: A restored prairie cleared of fences and abandoned ranches, reseeded with native bunchgrasses, teeming with wildlife. And foremost among these resurgent animals would be the emblematic beast of the Plains: the buffalo. Back by the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands. Plains residents, both white and Native American, would earn their money through ecotourism and franchise hunting, not punching cows and growing dryland wheat.
Because the Poppers' proposal was predicated in part on federal buyouts of private property, it kicked off a howling storm of protest from the Great Plains agricultural community. Ranchers saw it as the most sinister possible example of a federal land grab. Resistance was so great that the idea died aborning.
But that didn't change the reality of Plains demographics - a reality best apprehended from the air.
Fly in a puddle jumper from Denver to Bismarck, N.D., and look down. There are great tracts of Badlands and rolling prairie, huge expanses of "pothole country" spangled with ponds and marshes, entire square miles of dryland wheat and irrigated alfalfa, serpentine brown rivers lined with cottonwoods, the occasional road. Very few ranches, and fewer towns. No cities. The West and East coasts, the intermountain West, the Southwest, the Gulf Coast and the Deep South - they're exploding with development. Even the industrial Northeast, long a laggard in population growth, is gaining new people.
But not out here where the buffalo once roamed. Nearly three-quarters of Plains counties - 322 of 443 - have lost population since 1930. According to the 2000 census, 272 of 443 of the Plains counties have experienced population declines since 1990.
Demographers estimate that rural counties of the Dakotas could lose an additional third of their population in the next 20 years. From eastern New Mexico through the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, to large portions of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Montana, the story is the same.
The depopulation affecting the region is nothing more than the dying of a dream. Or a scheme, at least. At the turn of the century, the western Plains were considered the globe's most promising emerging breadbasket.
Cattle had thrived on the rich prairie bunchgrasses after the subjugation of the Plains Indians and the elimination of the buffalo.
Now, decided the pols in Washington, D.C., the rich black earth beneath the virgin sod would grow the nation's wheat.
The late 19th century and early 20th century were fairly wet on the prairie, reinforcing a popular idea of the time that "rain followed the plow." But years of drought followed, and homesteaders began washing out. The ruins of their farms are all over the Plains, ranging from abandoned dugout hovels to derelict three-story houses that are home to nothing but bats and owls.
"Agriculture around here is changing so fast you won't even recognize it in 10 years," said game warden Meirs as he sat in his truck listening to the wind whistle down Buffalo's main street. "The cattle and sheep are going by the wayside."
Buffalo Commons, it seems, is destined to occur - no matter what it's called, no matter who loves or hates it. But the forging of the Commons isn't a completely passive process.
True, the great federal investment envisioned by the Poppers didn't happen, nor is that likely. Given general public sentiment against extravagant government spending programs, it's inconceivable that Congress would loosen up the purse strings to fund the purchase of tens of millions of acres of bankrupt rangeland.
Instead, Buffalo Commons is becoming a private enterprise. And leading the movement is media mogul Ted Turner, who appears to have made the North American bison his private totem. Turner owns about 1.7 million acres divided among several ranches scattered across the Plains, and that figure is growing.
"I heard tell that Ted Turner wants to be able to ride all the way from Canada to Mexico on his own land," drawled one Nebraska rancher. "And the way he's going, it isn't going to be too long before he can do that." Turner looks for a certain kind of property: One that's in grass rather than croplands, with natural contours intact. He wants good biodiversity - country that supports substantial populations of wildlife of numerous species. And when he buys properties, he more or less follows the same formula: Tear out all the cross fencing and replant pastures with bunchgrasses and other native vegetation. Bring in the buffalo.
Turner believes that ranching can be profitable on the Plains - but not necessarily by raising cattle. He's promoting the sale of buffalo breeding stock and meat, luxury big game and bird hunts and ecotourism tours as the economic saviors of the region.
Unlike many celebrity landowners, Turner isn't gate-happy, and doesn't seem to mind rubberneckers as long as they don't stop to shoot his buffalo. And there are plenty of buffalo to see. Under a sky crowded with lowering gray cumulus, a couple of hundred of the shaggy beasts grazed near a roadside. About a mile away, on the same vast tract of rolling prairie, a similar number fed.
A Lakota hunter could have witnessed precisely this scene in this same place 150 years ago.
And buffalo aren't the only animals thriving on Turner's property. Big coveys of sharp-tailed grouse fly unhurriedly out of the way at the approach of a truck. White-tailed deer bolt from every coulee. Stop to watch scores of blue-winged teal bank and swoop around a pothole, and you catch the eerie, wild yapping of two coyotes singing in antiphony in the distance. Although he is operating on the most ambitious scale, Turner is by no means the only New Age buffalo rancher on the Plains. Many of Turner's compeers don't necessarily share his wildlife habitat goals. But the wildlife is nevertheless reaping the benefits of their bison husbandry.
Kirk Budd, the proprietor of Freshwater Ranch in Nebraska's Sand Hills, has lived the quintessential hardscrabble Plains life. He raised cattle until "they just about starved me out." He was a bush pilot in Canada for years, and was a crop duster until a pesticide accident almost killed him. Things, in short, were looking pretty grim for Budd. He was in danger of busting out, losing his ranch.
Then a few years ago, he bought some buffalo.
"They were cheap then," recalled Budd, crawling out from under an airplane he was repairing at his ranch. "About $400 for a cow. So I figured what the heck." Budd gradually expanded his herd, keeping the heifer calves, selling the bulls. He now owns several hundred buffalo on three ranches totaling 11,000 acres. Many are verging on coal black, and all are huge - much darker and far larger than Turner's brown-and-russet buffalo. His bred heifers sell for about $4,000.
Although Budd doesn't believe bison will utterly supplant cattle on the Plains, he feels buffalo ranching will continue to grow. "The National Buffalo Association says the country's herds are growing at 12 percent a year, but I know it's more than that. I know a lot of people in this business, and everyone is keeping all their heifers. I figure the real figure is more like 40 percent a year."
And compared with cattle, buffalo have been good to his land, Budd notes. Cattle like to wallow in water, tearing up creeks and ponds and trampling vegetation. But buffalo associate water with predators. They all go down at once to drink, then get out right away to higher ground. The creeks stay vegetated, and the water stays clean.
Indeed, the Freshwater Ranch looks markedly different from neighboring properties where cattle are grazed. The forage is in better condition, and the streams and ponds are far more vegetated. A creek that runs by the ranch house looks like prime trout water, and Budd confirms it is full of large brown trout.
And the ranch burgeons with wildlife. "A lot of critters like being with buffalo," Budd said. "They evolved with them. Deer, elk, antelope, wild turkeys. We even have bighorn sheep on one of our ranches. You can ranch buffalo, maybe even tame some you raise from a bottle. But they're basically wildlife. And you can see that reflected in the condition of the range on any ranch where they're raised."
As bullish as he is on buffalo, Budd doesn't think much of Buffalo Commons. "That will never, never fly out here," he said. "As soon as you start talking big government involvement, people resist. Also, a lot of this land is still irrigated, particularly to the east of the Sand Hills. It's growing soybeans, wheat, corn and alfalfa. "As a general policy, I don't think you should take all that food land out of production for a wildlife park. That's just not good for the nation."
While Plains farmers resist government intervention, they do understand - and appreciate - government subsidies. Federal payouts have been part of America's ranching and farming culture for decades, and although they have diminished in recent years, they're still relied on to make ends meet. Since the mid-1980s, many of those subsidies have been paid to cattle ranchers to conserve wildlife habitat on their lands. In the Dakotas, almost 500,000 acres of upland and wetland habitat have been preserved under these conservation reserve programs, benefiting a variety of species, but particularly migratory waterfowl.
The coteau region - a vast, hilly stretch of glacially carved potholes and ponds in the Dakotas, eastern Montana, Saskatchewan and Alberta - is a duck factory, explained Scott McCleod, a biologist with the northern Plains regional office of Ducks Unlimited in Bismarck. Ducks Unlimited is a conservation organization composed of primarily hunters that preserve wetlands and grasslands prairie. So far, it has saved 8 million acres of habitat essential to waterfowl in the United States and Canada.
"Sixty to 70 percent of the continent's major duck species breed in the prairie pothole region," McCleod said. "During the winter and spring migrations, the potholes serve as critical resting and staging areas for the birds."
The historic temptation for farmers, McLeod said, has been to drain the potholes to increase tillable acreage and plow the grass for relatively profitable crops like wheat, corn and sunflowers. "That's why we like to work with cattle ranchers rather than farmers," said McCleod. "Ranchers are interested in the same thing we are - preserving the grasslands."
The restoration under way is not necessarily a process that will proceed smoothly and steadily. Federal funds for conservation reserve programs could dry up; a prolonged recession could make the buying of megaranches by conservation-minded billionaires like Turner a thing of the past. But nothing, it seems, will change the bedrock reality of the western Plains: They are not well-suited for agriculture or year-round human habitation.
Native Americans knew how to live on them - by passing through, by following the buffalo that peregrinated from horizon to horizon. The record of permanent settlement on the Plains, on the other hand, has been dismal. One way or another, the Plains will devolve to their earlier condition: To a sea of grass, where people are the transient visitors, wildlife the enduring residents.
Bison are generally considered the emblematic animal of the Great Plains, and reintroduction efforts for the shaggy beasts are almost universally popular. But there's another keystone Plains species essential to grasslands restoration - and it's not nearly as esteemed as the buffalo. Prairie dogs were once the most common mammal in North America. In the late 19th century, about five billion prairie dogs of five species inhabited the Plains from Canada to Mexico. The vast majority were black-tailed prairie dogs, a stocky, buff-colored rodent that weighs between two to three pounds. Their vast towns comprised complete ecologies in their own right: One in Texas measured 100 miles wide, 250 miles long and contained an estimated 400 million dogs.
Prairie dogs shaped the Plains as much as the buffalo, and a considerable array of wild species depended on the rodents for shelter and food. The prairie dogs' various diggings provide shelter for a great many animals: badgers, foxes, burrowing owls and a tremendous variety of reptiles, amphibians and insects.
The huge quantity of feces and urine produced by the dog towns was a gigantic fertilizing mechanism for the Plains. Today, prairie dogs only inhabit about 1 percent of their former range; the black-tailed prairie dog is a candidate for protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Their decline began shortly after cattlemen moved to the Plains. Seen as competitors with cattle for forage, the dogs were poisoned and shot out.
A coalition of environmentalists is agitating for a return of the dog. "Prairie dogs are decreasing in numbers across their range," said Jonathan Proctor, a program associate with the Predator Coalition Alliance in Bozeman, Mont. Proctor's group was able to secure a temporary ban on poisoning on federal lands through a petition to list black-tailed prairie dogs under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
But the dogs are still shot in large numbers, often for sport. Such activities are widely condoned by ranchers. "There's no shortage of prairie dogs," said South Dakota rancher Pat Clark, who said the animals compete with cattle for grass and endanger livestock with their burrows. "They're all over the place." But scattered families of prairie dogs are no indication of the general health of the five species, Proctor said. Despite the pressures facing prairie dogs, Proctor said he is guardedly optimistic about their future. Colorado recently banned sport hunting for black-tailed prairie dogs, and South Dakota and Montana are considering similar restrictions, said Proctor.
"Basically, they'll come back if we stop actively killing them," he said.
"[T]he behavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted, or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche."
So how do you control a wolf if you have to routinely handle them for vaccines and captive breeding programs?
Well, as I have noted in the past, if the animal is a wild wolf that you have to trap for the occasional distemper or rabies vaccine (yes, many of our wild wolves are vaccinated), you might have to employ an offset leghold trap or snare.
With captive wolves, however, Mark has discovered that you can use the natural dominance-and-submission behaviors of the wolf to some advantage, as the video clip, above, suggests.
There are some nice lines in here.
"Feel how tense you are. If you're tense, the animal can feel how tense you are. So calm yourself down, breathe well, bring your energy down to your belly. That will calm the wolf..."
"The focus is to greet the animal, and my energy should be a combination of dominance and compassion."
One of the things that is going on here, of course, is extinguishing behavior -- the pole works best when biting the pole produces no draw back from the pole holder. Or, as Mark puts it, biting the pole produces no affirmation.
Extra points here for taking the rectal temperature and doing the microchipping. It appears that with a Y pole on a wolf, this can be done as easily as with a dog. Amazing.
Mark says this video will become part of a longer Y pole training video currently being produced by Global Wildlife Resources, Inc. .
The Druids were one of the most frequently photographed wolf packs in the Lamar Valley of the Yellowstone.
What happened to the Druids?
Life.
Life has a way of stepping in pretty frequently in the world of wolves, and in that tale lies a couple of lessons about dogs -- lessons about inbreeding and (yes) about dominance.
First, who were the wolves of the Druid Pack?
Like all wolf packs, the Druid pack was made up of a single dominant male, a single dominate female, and several satellite females, generally from previous whelps.
This architecture is not unique to wolves. Study red fox and African lions, and you will see the same thing -- a solitary mature male with one or more females, and only very young or adolescent males in attendance.
What happens to all the male wolves, fox, and lions that are born?
Simple: they are driven out.
In the case of a fox this usually occurs at around seven to nine months of age, and with a wolf anywhere from nine to 18 months of age, depending on the amount of food in the the area and the tolerance of the alpha male and the submissiveness of his get.
By then, the young males of these respective species are big enough to hunt on their own and yet they are also beginning to become potential rivals for females. The top male cannot have that.
Is the request to leave a good-natured "get along now?"
No.
Plain and simple, it is anything from harassing growlsand small bites to a full-scale ass-whipping by the big male.
However, it goes, in the end there will only be one mature male in the pack. Either the younger male will be driven off, or the old male will be dead or driven off himself.
You have heard of a "lone wolf"?
A lone wolf is almost always a young male driven out of his pack and traveling some distance to establish his own territory, and perhaps pick up a loose female or two along the way.
The same thing happens with fox and African lions, of course.
American Mountain Lions do not establish packs or prides like their African counterparts, but here too we find young males driven out to find their own territories in a distant country. When a mountain lion shows up in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, or Iowa, it is almost certain to be a young male driven out his natal home range to find a place for himself.
Now to be clear, what is going on here is dominance.
Anyone who says wolf packs are not governed by dominance has no idea what they are talking about.
Dominance creates wolf packs and dominance maintains wolf packs. The driving out of adolescent males is at the core of how wolf packs are created and maintained. This is dominance. And it is Wolf Pack 101.
What about females?
The female wolves in a wolf pack also have their dominance issues. You see with wolves, there may be many mature females in the pack, but there will almost always be only one female who will come into estrus, be mated, and whelp.
How is that "top female" determined?
Well, the male picks her, of course (or vice versa if the pack has lost its alpha male)
That said the individual picked is generally the healthiest and strongest female in the group - the one that all the other females are submissive to.
This is what Darwin was talking about when he refered to "survival of the fittest." The weakest genes are not just culled out of the gene pool due to disease, defect and predation. They are also selected out.
Why does Mother Nature drive all the young males out of the pack?
The answer is that Mother Nature demands a regular reshuffling of the genetic deck. The way that is done is by driving out the males to discourage inbreeding with sisters.
The sisters, of course, stick around to help bring down larger game and feed the alpha female's young. But the young males? They have to hit the road.
A strong and lucky male may hold a top slot for as long as a decade, but more often that not the top male will die from injuries or disease long before that. And with that male's death, a new male, from outside the pack, will be recruited and a complete outcross achieved.
Injuries? How do wolves get injured?
Wolves get injured all the time. A lone male wolf from another pack may show up and stand at the edge of a territory and try to "call off" a female or two in order to start his own pack. That may, in turn, be met with a challenge by the dominant male who wants to hold on to what he has. Injuries can occur!
The pick up artist.
More often injury and death will come from a jaw-shattering kickfrom an elk or deer, a trap, vehicle impact, a hunter or rancher's bullet, intentional or unintentional poisoning, a ripped ligament, an infected wound, or disease.
The hunt.
Disease is no small issue. Distemper routinely knocks down wild canid populations, and so too does rabies and mange. Add in worms and infections, and the bottom line is simple: Most male wolves do not live too far past age 7.
But, of course, the vagaries and savageries of life in the wild can befall the top female wolf in the pack, as well as the top male wolf. The hand of God shuffles red cards, same as black.
And so, in the real world, we tend to have a turnover every few years as either the alpha male or the alpha female rotates out of their respective top slots.
And with every turnover at the top, new dominance and submission issues are front and center.
No, there is not a constant battle in a wolf pack, but Mother Nature does abhor a power vacuum, and yes individuals do rush in to fill a power vacuum.
And yes, life-ending battles do occur in every Yellowstone pack every year.
In the video clip, at the very top of this post, cinematographer and wolf expert Bob Landis talks about conflicts he has seen between and within wolf packs, and he talks about Wolf 21, the Alpha male in the Druid pack.
How did 21 become the Alpha male?
It seems that in late December of 1998, the top male wolf in the Druid Pack was Wolf 38. The pack left the boundaries of Yellowstone Park to follow the elk, however, and just outside the park's boundaries, Wolf 38 was killed by a poacher.
With their alpha male dead the Druid Pack re-entered Yellowstone National Park where Wolf 21, a single "lone wolf" refugee expelled from the Rose Creek Pack, happened to be waiting.
If the old alpha male, Wolf 38, had still been alive, Wolf 21 would have been drive out or killed (as three other displaced Rose Creek Wolves had met their fate before 21's arrival). But with Wolf 38 now dead, Wolf 21 now had an unexpected opportunity to impress.
The Alpha Female of the pack, Wolf 40, realized she needed a mate, but 21 still had to spend 6 hours, bowing, flexing, strutting, sniffing, and facing down all the females in the Druid Pack before he was deemed to be big enough, strong enough, friendly enough, and smart enough to be the leader. Yes, this 21 wolf had skills! And in the end, the older, but still fertile, Wolf 40, was won over and gave 21 his slot in the pack as her new mate, the alpha male. with the task of fighting off all interlopers, as Wolf 38 had done before him.
I tell this story, because it's important to realize Landis does not just make stuff up. He films it all, and he gets lucky" because he spends 300 days a year in the field in heat and snow, bugs and rain, watching the wolves.
Only two months ago, there were 11 wolves in the pack. But after the alpha female was killed by another pack, the old alpha male wandered off rather than breed with one of the other female wolves that were his offspring. He also suffered from a bad case of mange. Mange is a skin infection caused by a mite, which leads to hair loss. In animals with weakened immune systems, it can be fatal. Seven other females in the pack also had mange, and all but one have died either from mange or been killed by other packs.
"They're down to one and that one probably won't make it through the winter," Smith said.
Killed by other packs? But I thought wolves were gentle!
You think a wolf killing a wolf might have something to do with dominance?
"This space is my space," "this food is my food," "this female is my female"?
Nah! No doubt they died in a religious war!
The Casper Wyoming Star Tribune article goes on to note that at one point the Druid pack had 37 members, making it the largest known wild wolf pack in the world.
In 2000, however, "an alliance of three subordinate females in the Druid pack is believed to have killed the pack's alpha female, the first such intra-pack kill documented in the park."
WHAT? Three other wolves ganged up to kill their mother or sister? And she was the alpha? Whoa! That's right out of Shakespeare! No aggression or dominance issues there! And she is the second alpha female to bite the dust in this one article?! Whoa! There are clearly no aggression, dominance, or pack pecking orders in a wolf pack! All sweetness and familial light.
Bob Landis and the Yellowstone wolf team, of course, have spent more time, watching wolves in the wild than anyone in the world, living or dead. And yes they have it all on video tape.
But you won't hear his name mentioned by the pure click and treat crowd who want to negate all hierarchies, all dominance, and all submission in wolf packs.
You see if the facts do not fit the frame, you throw out the facts!
And so they quote people like Tamar Geller, who says wolves and dogs are just like each other and she knows because she watched a few wolves for a month at a feeding station in the deserts of Israel.
Ms. Geller says wolves do not have pack hierarchies, have no aggression, and dominance is never an issue. With wolves, it's just play, play, play.
Or else they quote Ian Dunbar who, to the best of my knowledge has never had anything to do with wolves.
Or else they make extraordinary claims, such as that "there are no such things as packs of wild dogs."
Really? No packs of wild dogs?? How about the fellow that was killed and eaten by a pack of wild dogs right here in the U.S. just a few months back? That did not happen? No rural farmer has ever seen a pack of feral dogs hunting deer in the woods? Really? Who knew!?
To be clear, this paper is NOT the ground-breaking study, some have made it out to be.
In fact, is it a very weak and not too well written paper that simply says wolf packs are an extended family unit. No news there!
And what does Mr. Mech say about dominance?
Well actually, he says there is quite a LOT of it! For example, he writes:
We noted each time a wolf submitted posturally to another wolf. Usually this deference was characterized by "licking up" to the mouth of the dominant animal in the "active submission" posture similar to that described by Darwin (1877) for domestic dogs. Often this behavior took place as an animal returned to the den area after foraging, and sometimes the returning individual disgorged food to the soliciting wolf (Mech 1988; Mech et al. 1999). Other behavior noted included "pinning," or passive submission (Schenkel 1967), in which the dominant wolf threatened another, which then groveled, and "standing over," in which one wolf stands over another, which often lies nonchalantly but in a few cases sniffs the genitals of the other. I did not consider "standing over" a dominance behavior.
Eh? Mech does not consider one dog standing over another an act of dominance?
Oooooo-kaaaaaay. Let's not count those then.
But if it's not dominance, pray tell what is it?
Well actually, he does not say.
Like I said, the paper is not too well written !
Consider this paragraph:
The only consistent demonstration of rank in natural packs is the animals' postures during social interaction. Dominant wolves assume the classic canid standing posture with tail up at least horizontally, and subordinate or submissive individuals lower themselves and "cringe" (Darwin 1877). In fact, submission itself may be as important as dominance in terms of promoting friendly relations or reducing social distance.
WHAT??? Now one wolf standing over another IS dominance?
But just a few paragraphs earlier, Mech said it was not.
Pick a point of view and stick with it why don't cha?
Of course, that's the problem a lot of folks have in these wolf and dog debates.
One person says dogs are not wolves and then five minutes later they say they are great admirers of Tamara Geller who thinks dogs ARE wolves and that wolves are all about play, play, play.
Eh? Pick one.
Of course the same people claim Cesar Millan says dogs are wolves, but when challenged to cite a page, paragraph or episode where that claim is made, there is (so far) a failure to deliver.
We are similarly told that Cesar Millan says everything about dogs is related to dominance.
He does? I missed that! Citation please!
In fact, what Millan actually says is that everything is about loving your dog, exercising your dog, and not treating your dog like it's your child.
And he says, at the top of every show, what he actually does.
He does not train dogs.
He rehabilitates dogs. He trains people.
What he is saying here is pretty clear: Cesar Millan is NOT the person you go to if your goal is to get your dog to learn a decent "sit-stay" or agility routine.
Ian Dunbar or any of the college girls down at PetSmart can help you with that, and they prove it every week.
But if you have a dog that is phobic, or is routinely ripping into another dog (or your child or wife) then the girls at PetSmart might not be the right wrench for that nut.
Cesar Millan is, and he proves it every week.
The funny part of all this is that I have written many times that dogs are not wolves. Dogs are dogs.
So far as I can tell, Cesar Millan has never said dogs are wolves. Please give me a citation if you find him saying otherwise.
And, to put a point on it, I have never said a bad word about clicker training. Quite the opposite. It works well for training puppies, young dogs, and dogs with no serious issues.
So far as I can tell, Cesar Millan has never said a bad thing about clicker training either. Again, please give me a citation if you can find him saying otherwise.
So who is raising up all the wolf stuff?
Well, actually, it's the people who are opposed to any kind of aversives (no matter how mild) in any kind of situation.
They are not arguing that clicker training works (there is no opposing argument on the matter); they are arguing it is the ONLY solution to EVERY dog problem, and that NO other system works.
Yes, that's right, a clicker is a "one size fit all" wrench for every problem under the sun.
But instead of proving that by actually going on TV to "cure" a psychotic pit bull that lives to kill cats, they have decided to go off into the weeds to talk about wolves.
Wolves? I thought we were talking about training dogs?
But no, they want to talk about wolves.
Which would be fine, I suppose, but what they have to tell us about wolves is, in fact, contradicted by the very studies they cite!
But of course, if the facts do not fit the frame, then throw out the frame, right?
And what about the video tape?
Yeah, throw that out too. Especially the clip below, and the next one and the next one. Who cares if this is a story about dominance as riveting as anything penned By Shakespeare? This does not fit the frame, so out it must go.
The omega female is driven out by the alpha female.
Ranger McEntire of the Malheur National Forest (Eastern Oregon), Winter 1912 - 1913
A repost from this blog circa 2005
In 1887, 14 years before he became President, Theodore Roosevelt joined with a distinguished group of sporting Americans -- including George Bird Grinnell, William Tecumseh Sherman, John Lacey, and Gifford Pinchot -- to form the Boone and Crockett Club. The men who created the Boone and Crockett Club were all dedicated hunters. Grinell was editor of Field and Stream magazine, a hunting and fishing journal, and as editor, he was shocked at the rapid depletion of America’s wildlife due to unregulated market hunting
Though by charter the Boone and Crockett Club numbered only 100 people, it was a very influential group. John Lacey eventually became a Member of Congress from Iowa and, in 1900, just before Roosevelt became President, he managed to get Congress to pass the Lacey Act which made it a federal crime to transport wild game across state lines if had been killed in violation of state laws — the first federal restriction on commercial market hunting in the United States.
Roosevelt, of course, became Vice President and then President upon the assassination of William McKinnley. An avid sport hunter, Roosevelt was also an accomplish naturalist, and counted among his friends John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, and best-selling wildlife author John Burroughs.
It is hard to overstate the importance of hunting in Roosevelt’s life. Suffice it to say that he chose not to run for President after his second term so that he could go to Africa on a year-long safari, hunting big game and collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution.
During his presidency (1901 to 1911), Roosevelt more than tripled the National Forest system to 148 million acres (and made Gifford Pinchot the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service), oversaw the creation of 150 new national forest areas in 21 states, created four national game preserves, 51 federal bird sanctuaries, and established 18 national monuments. No president, before or since, has created such a sweeping public lands legacy.
In 1911, shortly after Roosevelt left office, Congress passed the Weeks Act to authorize the purchase of forest lands in the east. Much of this land later became part of the National Forest system in the eastern United States.
That same year the American Game Protective Association (AGPA) was founded and funded by gun and ammunition companies such as Winchester. This was the first sportsman-supported organization in the U.S. with a full-time professional staff, and it was later renamed the Wildlife Management Institute. In 1913, the shooting of migratory birds was regulated — the first step toward building back game bird populations deeply impacted by over-hunting.
America’s hunters lead the charge for wildlife habitat protection and the regulation of hunting seasons, providing an intellectual and moral framework now known as “hook and bullet conservation”.
Hook and bullet conservation has produced truly astounding results in the U.S. over the course of the last 100 years. Despite a three-fold increase in the U.S. population since 1900, we now have more bear, cougar, buffalo, turkey, elk, geese, duck, fox, raccoon, possum, alligator, groundhog, bald eagle, pronghorn, wolf, coyote, bobcat, and deer than at any time in the last 100 years. Beaver, turkey and river otter have been reintroduced into areas where they were wiped out, and wolf, elk and cougar are beginning to return to the east.
All of this has been made possible because the land and the forest -- otherwise voiceless -- has a voting constituency among American hunters and anglers. Not all hunters and anglers are good sportsmen who understand the need for conservation, but all good sportsmen are conservationists who understand the value of habitat and self-restraint. .
Prior to the atomization of wilderness, is was very rare for wolves, leopards, lions, etc, to inbreed very deeply for the simple reason that males were generally driven from their natal territories as they matured.
The "lone wolf" story is not a myth -- it is merely a very young or very old male wolf pushed out to try its luck finding a new territory ... or die trying. Much the same occurs with red fox, as I have noted in the past.
Wolves may travel many hundreds of miles looking for a space -- and a mate -- to call their own.
In very rare occasions, however, very isolated wolf populations have developed. The most famous of these is on the 206-square mile Isle Royale in Lake Superior, where two or three wolves crossed over on the ice in the 1940s in order to prey on a booming moose population that had established itself on the island around 1900.
The latest news is that an examination of Isle Royale wolves has found that the two dozen or so gray wolves on the island are suffering from backbone malformations caused by inbreeding, and that the abnormalities cause pain and partial paralysis while limiting the range of motion necessary for the wolf population to remain viable predators.
A full 58 percent of the wolves on Isle Royale have a congenital malformation in the lumbosacral region or lower back. This malformation is identical to the lumbar sacral deformities seen in German Shepherds. Other malformed vertebrae problems are also evident. Scientists note that while only 1 percent of noninbred wolf populations have malformed vertebrae, all of the Isle Royale wolf bone remains examined in the past 17 years have shown vertebrae problems.
Domestic dogs with LSTV malformities tend to suffer from cauda equina syndrome (CES), which involves injury to the spinal cord and associated nerve roots. The consequences of CES are variable and include partial paralysis; deficits in placing reactions when walking; deficits in voluntary movement of the tail; loss of muscle tone causing weakness of the hind limbs and flaccidity of the tail, low back pain and incontinence.
Dead Isle Royale wolf with tracking collar still on.
A question arises, in correspondence: Do different species really interbreed in the wild? And if they do interbreed on occasion, aren't they all sterile like the mules made by crossing donkeys to horses ?
The short answer is:Yesthey do, and Nothey are are not all sterile. And, for the record, not all horses crossed with donkeys are sterile. Most are, but not all!
First, let me say that this point is basic to understanding biology: fertile hybrids occur, and they are critical to evolution.
This was a basic point of Darwin'sOrigin of Species and in subsequent works, such as the truly excellent The Beak of the Finch, whose authors spent 20 years on the Galapagos studying Darwin's finches.
The basic point here is that in the Galapagos the finches have not completely speciated, and the same is true for some of the Giant Tortoise and Iguana types on the Galapagos.
Even in those animals where we can say speciation has occurred under any definition, fertile crosses within genera are fairly commonplace.
On the Galapagos, each species of finch fills a distinct ecological niche for plant species, but the finches also cross-breed with some frequency which creates intermediate hybrids. Each type of bill (and there are more than a dozen types) is slightly more or less advantageous on each island, but due to the vagaries of weather (several years of drought in the Galapagos may be followed by several years of higher-than-average rainfall), no one beak is always right all the time, on some islands.
What this means is that while booming populations sometimes ride on the wave of the more extreme beaks and weather patterns, the core gene pool on which all variety on the Galapagos depends are the intermediates, which includes the crossbreeds or hybrids.
Because most hybrids are not genetically stable (i.e. a hybrid mated to a hybrid may produce offspring which look very different from their parents and each other), these hybrid birds are often the evolutionary watch spring which helps kick forward the next "population boom" of variety when weather patterns change for years on end.
What Darwin saw in the Galapagos was a perfect example of a common phenomenon.
In fact, hybrid animals are generally the fastest form of evolutionary advance and, as a consequence, hybrids occur all the time for the simple reason that a little "wobble" in the gene pool is always a good thing in a rapidly changing world beset, since the very beginning, by fire, flood, drought, tsunami, hurricane, global warming, global cooling, freak weather conditions, epidemics of disease, and wave after wave of invading "foreign" species.
Another point is that evolution is not something that happened "a long time ago" -- it is happening right now outside your door, and if you are really observant, you can even see it with your own eyes.
Look at your bird feeder, for example.
What the hell is that "little brown job" over there in the corner?
Yes, yes, it is a sparrow or finch of some type, but what type?
If you are really confused (and if you watch bird feeders long enough, you eventually will be), don't get too worried. You see, the bird you are looking at may be a bit confused too. It turns out that there are a lot of hybrid sparrows and finches out there, and most of them are fertile and quite a few breed.
There are hybrid Brewer’s × Black-chinned sparrows and hybrid Grasshopper X Savannah sparrows, and hybrid House X Tree sparrows, and ... the list is quite long.
Birds hybridizeall the time. Ducks and geese are particularly proficient at it. Go to any major lake during duck migrations, and if you glass the water carefully, and for a long enough time, you will eventually see a free-ranging duck hybrid.
If you go "past the feathers" into the DNA of the birds, however, you will find that there are even more hybrids than at first meets the eye. A lot of duck species are not entirely "pure." Most mallards, for example, seem to have a little Black Duck coursing through their veins, while in Europe the Ruddy Duck and the Whiteheaded Duck hybridize so frequently, that there is some danger pure Whiteheaded Ducks may be pushed into extinction.
Geese too will naturally hybridize, of course. Canadian geese, for starters, will naturally hybridize with Greylag geese and Barnacle geese and White-fronted geese and ... well, you get the idea.
Here in the U.S and Canada, Dusky or Blue Grouse very occasionally hybridize with Ring-necked Pheasant, and Sharp-tailed Grouse very occasionally cross with Prairie Chickens, while Willow Ptarmigan will occasionally cross with Spruce Grouse.
In the bird-watching world, naturally occurring (and quite fertile) hybrids occur all the time between spotted owls and barred owls, as do crosses between Yellow-shafted and Red-shafted Flickers, and the various species of Amazon parrots.
Mammals hybridize less frequently than birds, but they too are not too hard to find.
Object lesson one is the Red Wolf, found right here in the eastern Unites States. Not only is this animal nothing more than a stable hybrid between the Gray Wolf and the Coyote, it is a very fertile animal.
Coyotes and domestic dogs will, of course interbreed, as will Wolves and domestic dogs, and Jackals and domestic dogs, and Dingos and domestic dogs, and this progeny too is quiet fertile, though the estrus cycles may be a bit off from the natural version found among the wild animal population.
What about other animals? They too hybridize on occasion. Lynx and Bobcat will naturally interbreed in the wild where their ranges overlap and the population of Lynx is low (as it always is in the U.S.). These Lynx X Bobcat hybrids are fertile, and have been found from Maine to Minnesota, and confirmed by DNA analysis.
In Europe, hybrids between feral cats and European Wild Cats are so common that it is now very hard to find a pure European Wild Cat at all outside of an island sanctuary in the Outer Hebrides.
Even larger animals will hybridize on rare occasions. In 2006, for example, an American hunter in Canada shot what he thought was a Polar Bear, but upon close examination it was found to have brown splotches on its coat and a hump on its back, suggesting it was a Grizzly. DNA tests, however, confirmed that the animal was a naturally occurring Grizzly Bear-Polar Bear hybrid. Pairings of these animals have been done at zoos, and they have all been quite fertile.
Buffalo will naturally hybridize with cattle, and in fact they have done so for such a long time that there are not too many 100% pure buffalo around anymore.
Mule deer and Whitetail deer will naturally hybridize on occasion, though apparently the animals that come about from this union have erratic escape behavior patterns, which make them susceptible to predation.
What about fish? There are too many hybrid fish types to mention, but suffice it to say that trout, salmon and many other types of fish will naturally hybridize, as will some insects (such as butterflies and fruit flies).
In the world of reptiles, we find naturally occurring hybrids occurring between American Alligators and Cuban Caymans to the point that pure Cuban Caymans are getting harder to find.
And, of course, in the plant world hybrids are a dime a dozen, and include not only most of the plants we eat, and a very large number in the garden, but increasing numbers of plants found in our forests and fields as well (many are escapees from the garden, it should be said).
You will note that I have not even mentioned "prison romance marriages" where animals are kept in cages for long periods of time. If this is done, all kinds of hybrids are possible, and though most are sterile, fertile offspring between many types seems to be possible, and between some types it is the rule. For example, a hybrid cross between a male leopard and a female jaguar is called a Jagulep or Lepjag and they are always fertile. This hybrid animal, for the record, was once crossed with a male lion, and the progeny was displayed as a "Congolese Spotted Lion." The mind reels.
The bottom line: YES, hybrids DO occur in wild nature, and YES many of those hybrids are quite fertile.
So what happens to these fertile hybrids? Not all of them mate. It turns out (surprise!) that the ability to mate is not the same as actually doing so, and that many hybrids have inappropriate or awkward courtship displays.
Think computer geeks at a Star Trek convention, and you get the right idea.
So far as I can tell, however, most fertile hybrids do eventually mate with one side of their gene pool or another. For example, a Lynx-Bobcat hybrid is very like to mate with a Bobcat, further diluting the Lynx infusion and reverting the progeny, very quickly, back to type. No doubt this "infusion-pollution-dilution" of genes has been going on with birds and fish since the beginning.
Hybrids are, of course, statistically rare. When animals are in abundance, most species mate with their own kind.
That said, there are a lot of duck hybrids if for no other reason than than there are a hundreds of millions of ducks flying all over the world.
There are fewer Grizzlies and Polar Bear hybrids because there are fewer Grizzlies and Polar Bears, and both animals do not normally travel distances of thousands of miles several times a year as a duck naturally will.
And what about Mules? Well almost all mules (Donkey X Horse) and Hinnies (Horse X Donkey) are sterile, but at least a very, very few females are not. So even here, where the number of chromosomes between species is not even the same, we find the "rules of nature" being broken, and the wobble of genetic possibilities being preserved. .
In a bit of genetic sleuthing, a team of researchers has determined that black wolves and coyotes in North America got their distinctive color from dogs that carried a gene mutation to the New World.
The finding presents a rare instance in which a genetic mutation from a domesticated animal has benefited wild animals by enriching their “genetic legacy,” the scientists write in Thursday’s Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. Since black wolves are more common in forested areas than on the tundra, the researchers concluded that melanism — the pigmentation that came from the mutation — must give those animals an adaptive advantage.
I have to say that I am not buying it for a very simple reason: melanism is a relatively common occurrence among ALL animals, same as albinoism is. It naturally occurs in deer, mice, beaver, squirrels, fox, raccoon and every other mammal under the sun, and there is no need for it to have migrated in from dogs.
As for the New York Times article by Mark Derr, it is mostly bullshit.
Read it carefully, and note how he carefully fudges dates and intentionally complicates paragraphs in order to obscure the fact that it is unclear whether the melanistic gene predates dogs and wolves coming to North America -- or the rise of dogs at all.
In short, the scientists here appear to be saying nothing very definitive other than wolves and dogs are related (no news there), and so too is the gene that creates melanism in wolves and dogs (not much news there).
Pardon me if I think that story is a bit of a yawn. And I guess Mark Derr did too, because he worked like hell to tell a different story that is not demonstrably supported by the data.
As for dogs and mDNA, you will pardon me if I do not rush out and salute everything written just right now.
Remember that there's a small raft of scientists and companies who claim they can take a cheek swab from your dog and tell you what breed it is, sight unseen. But, in fact, it is bunk. These companies have been shown to be fakes, and the folks doing the tests cannot tell a Chihuahua from a Dalmatian based on DNA evidence alone.
Caveat emptor. And I think that is especially true when reading news reports about purported scientific breakthroughs. Look for the weasel words: may, might, could, perhaps, etc.
In this case, the paragraph that wipes out the first four is the fifth one. You were supposed to have stopped reading before you got to it, or else leaped over it to the rest of the story which is mostly naked conjecture.
Shame on you if you stopped at paragraph five and read it two or three times!
(hat tip to Reid Farmer for pointing me to the NYT article)
Yes, we are going to have to shoot some problem wolves to keep things under control in some areas, but NO, we are not going back to wholesale extermination of the wolf, thank you very much.
The best headline of the week, of course, was this one (take your pick) First things first.
One of the ironies of wildlife management is that the very devices that pushed so much wildlife to the edge of extinction -- guns and traps -- are the very things that are now working to bring wildlife back.
The difference between today and 120-years ago is the rise of hunter-conservationists who understand the value of hunting seasons, the need for limits, and the necessity of wildlife habitat conservation and reclamation.
In earlier posts, I have detailed the history behind the return of the wild turkey which, in the space of 50 years, went from teetering on the edge of extinction to a population of 5.5 million birds distributed over a greater range than occurred even in pre-Columbian times.
Wild turkey hunting is now a billion-dollar-a-year industry, with 2.6 million hunters harvesting about 700,000 birds a year.
The article below is about the return of the river otter to Middle America. As Audubon magazine noted just a few years ago, "More than 2,000 river otters have been caught in legholds in the South and released virtually unscathed in Midwestern states where the species had been extirpated."
Back in the 1990s, when the river otter was being reintroduced in Ohio, Audubon was not only defending the use of leghold traps as necessary for the reintroduction of species like the river otter, but also for management of such species as the wolf and nuisance abatement of other species such as beaver, raccoon, and red fox.
For those interested in the foundation history of wildlife management in America, Aldo Leopold's book on Game Management is still in print more than 70 years after its first publication. Chapter 10 is on predator control. >> Click here to buy
January 21, 2005
Ohio wildlife officials consider allowing otter trapping after success of reintroduction programs
By: Carrie Spencer, Associated Press
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The wily and playful river otter was once on the verge of extinction in Ohio. Now they're thriving - and causing so much damage that wildlife officials are considering allowing hunters to trap them.
It's a situation other states have had with other animals. In Florida and New Jersey, it's the black bear. The Rockies and Alaska have the gray wolf. Nearly everywhere else, it's the white-tailed deer and Canada goose.
"In a human-dominated landscape, it's really tough to keep wildlife in the numbers we feel are appropriate," said Greg Butcher, a zoologist with the Washington-based National Audubon Society. "We have affected the environment so much that a lot of natural checks and balances are gone."
The otter's numbers have soared in just two decades - from 123 to about 4,300 - and Ohio wildlife officials are proposing a permit-only two-month trapping season. The Ohio Wildlife Council will vote on the proposal in April.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that wildlife causes US$1 billion ([euro]770 million) in crop and livestock damage each year, while deer collisions injure about 29,000 motorists a year and cost another $1 billion ([euro]770 million). Bird collisions cost the aviation industry $740 million ([euro]572 million) annually.
The otter's story is familiar. Fur trapping drove the native species from Ohio by the early 1900s, but their reintroduction - starting in 1986 and lasting seven years - has been so successful that farmers are starting to complain. A family of otters can eat half the fish in a privately stocked pond before the owner gets wind of their visits.
"If they find a nice trout farm, they're pretty happy with that," said C. Greg Anderson, assistant biology professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif.
Otters used to be in every U.S. state except Hawaii but were wiped out over 70 percent of their range, Anderson said. Reintroduction programs began in the 1980s in 21 states, all successes. Missouri, one of the first with 19 otters released in 1982, now has more than 10,000 and allows trapping, he said. Kentucky began its first otter season this winter, running through February.
Government-sanctioned hunting of all kinds of animals is proliferating across the country.
Starting in February, private landowners in Montana and Idaho won't need written approval to kill gray wolves harassing livestock, while Wyoming is suing the federal government to get its wolf management plan approved. From about 30 wolves introduced 10 years ago, 825 or more now live in the three states.
Florida wildlife officials reported a record number of sightings of threatened black bears in 2004 because of sprawling development and busier roads. The state is studying the bear population and could lift its protected status this year.
New Jersey's second annual bear hunt was called off this year amid a dispute over the state's management plan. New Jersey has more than 3,000 bears, up from fewer than 100 in the 1970s.
Hunting groups once feared the disappearance of white-tailed deer, but management encouraging reproduction worked too well. Last fall, the Cleveland suburb of Solon became the latest Ohio community to hire sharpshooters to cull the prolific landscape munchers.
Few success stories compare with that of the giant strain of Canada goose, which was nearly extinct in the 1960s because of hunting and lack of their preferred grassland habitat.
In the Midwest, restrictions on hunting coincided with the explosion of office parks with manicured lawns and lush golf courses. The birds, with their 6-foot wingspans, are now fouling picnic spots and hissing and nipping at golfers. States from North Dakota to Pennsylvania have expanded hunting allowances.
While some see overpopulation as triumph over extinction, the Animal Protection Institute sees it as failure on the part of wildlife officials. Reintroduction of a native animal requires planning to prevent an overrun, said Barbara Schmitz of the Sacramento, California-based institute.
"A lot of times, lethal solutions are looked at first," Schmitz said. "It is possible for them to become part of the balance of nature again."
In 1900 there were only 800 bison left in all of the U.S. Today, however, captive bison are so numerous they are sold as supermarket food, and management of wild populations is required to keep herds stable and healthy.
Gray wolves have been listed as endangered since 1974, and a population of 66 animals were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in 1995 and 1996. These animals have since reproduced to a population of 1,500, and as a consequence the Federal Goverment is now moving to delist wolves in three states -- Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
In Idaho, a plan is afoot to kill as many as 300 of the 700 wolves believed to be in the state.
The ironic thing (and the thing that reveals the politics behind the delisting initiative) is that Idaho, Wyoming and Montana do not have the largest wolf population in the U.S.; that would be Minnesota.
So what makes Idaho, Montana and Wyoming so special that these states get their very own wolf-killing pass?
The answer: powerful local interests which represent cattle ranchers and big game guides.
These folks want the wolves shot, theorizing that wolves represent a threat to their industries.
Of course the real threat to the cattle industry is something else, as the recent recall of 143 million pounds of meat mixed with "downer" cattle reveals.
As for the elk herd populations, they are still larger than the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service want on the land. Elk over-population remains Topic One when discussing herd management issues in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.
Taking the wolf off the Endangered Species list does not necessarily mean that it is open season on wolves or that they can be legally hunted. What it does mean is that wolf abatement will be easier for ranchers, and that drunken rednecks who shoot wolves from their trucks will not longer face Federal charges. All three states will now have to develop, and submit, wolf management plans before any wolf killing-culling-hunting initiatives are begun.
Will the wolves manage to thrive anyway? That's the assessment of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service which notes that wolves are both smart and fecund.
The other bit of good news is that wolves exist in states other than Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Along with a larger wolf population in Minnesota, there is a small population in Michigan, a small but growing population in Wisconsin, a small population of red wolves in North Carolina, and a few wolves in Oregon, etc.
Across the U.S. there might be 4,000 wolves in the wild, out of a national population that was once estimated to top 200,000 animals. .
The Tower of London once housed a menagerie or "bestiary" with a fantastic assortment of creatures, ranging from wolves, lions and leopards to giraffes, monkeys and tigers.
The "Tiger Tower" stood for over 600 years (beginning in the 1230s), and was located where the gift shop at the Tower of London is now situated. This precursor to the London Zoo provided London residents with a glimpse of the fauna to be found in the larger world.
Among the famous who visited were Samuel Pepys, William Blake (who illustrated his poem The Tyger" after sketching the animal from life at the Tower), and one Geoffrey Chaucer who worked at the Tower for two years (1389-1390).
A terrier features prominently in the closing of the Tiger Tower. By the early 1830s, the close quarters and poor condition of the animals kept at the Tower had become a minor issue. Exotic animals expired with some regularity. They were difficult to replace, and their death made for poor public relations.
Things came to a head on April 29, 1834, when a "large and furious" wolf managed to slip out of his cage inside the Tiger Tower. The wolf immediatly headed for the interior of the Tower across a short moat, but he was thwarted by a keeper - one Sergeant Cropper - who quickly shut a door to pevent the wolf from gaining further access.
Cropper's small terrier, always at his side, rushed in to do battle with the wolf. The terrier quickly realized it was over-matched, however, and it raced up the stairs into Cropper's little residence where his wife and daughter were located. The wolf, of course, followed close on his heels, and the battle continued inside the apartment. Once can only be imagine the carnage and sound that ensued, but the battle interlude gave the woman and girl time to flee, though it surely cost the terrier its life.
The wolf was eventually recaptured, but the Tiger Tower was closed the next year and the animals transferred to the newly opened London Zoo in Regent's Park.
In 1852, the Tiger Tower itself was destroyed, although the "Lion Gate" remains. This tale can be found in The Tower Menagerie by Daniel Hahn. .
Simple: Just take the calmest most gentle fox you can find, and keep breeding and culling them for 40 years. And Yes, it's been done.
For an easy-to-read version of the story, click here. The original March 1, 1999 article from The American Scientist is here. The authors of this article note that:
"[After] 40 years and 45,000 [fox]... our experiment has achieved an array of concrete results. The most obvious of them is a unique population of 100 foxes (at latest count), each of them the product of between 30 and 35 generations of selection. They are unusual animals, docile, eager to please and unmistakably domesticated. When tested in groups in an enclosure, pups compete for attention, snarling fiercely at one another as they seek the favor of their human handler. Over the years several of our domesticated foxes have escaped from the fur farm for days. All of them eventually returned. Probably they would have been unable to survive in the wild."
As the foxes became tamer, some of their ears flopped (only elephant ears flop in the wild), their tails curved over their back like many domestic dogs (and like the wolf-dogs kepy by the American Indians), the legs got shorter, the heads got wider, their snouts got shorter, their bark became dog-like, and specific color phases occured, such as white added in the head region.
A Footnote: The Russian researchers which had spent 40 years doing this study became a victim of cost cuts after the fall of the Soviet Union, and they were forced to start selling tame foxes as house pets.
For a video version of the story, with Ray Coppinger doing the explaining and Dan Ackroyd doing the narration, see the clip below:
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