Pilgrims from England landed on the coast of present-day Massachusetts in 1620 to carve a settlement from a vast and forbidding wilderness. Living cheek by jowl with North America’s wolves, settlers quickly came to fear and loathe these formidable predators, which competed for deer and preyed on livestock. Spurred on by tales of werewolves terrorising the towns and villages of Europe, the Pilgrims and those who came after them set about wiping wolves from the face of the continent. In 1630, their young colony became the first to offer a bounty for every wolf killed. Nearly four centuries later, conservationists are trying to rescue red and eastern wolves from oblivion.
IN THE centuries before Europeans arrived in North America, the wolf was a source of awe and a powerful symbol to the people who lived there. Like them, it was an accomplished hunter that fed its family and defended it against harm. Many tribes maintained it was the wolf that originally taught them to hunt. The Kwakiutl in present-day British Columbia identified so closely with wolves that they believed they were once wolves themselves. In Cherokee lore, the wolf was a close companion of Kana’ti, the first man.
European settlers newly arrived in the wilds of North America had a very different view of this top predator. Weaned on terrifying tales of killer wolves from the likes of Aesop and the brothers Grimm, they immediately set to work exterminating them, and very nearly succeeded in the case of red and eastern wolves.
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The settlers’ fear of wolves seemed almost hard-wired, as anyone who has ever heard a wolf howl in a dark forest in the dead of night will appreciate. As British explorer John Lawson wrote in 1709 in A New Voyage to Carolina: “When they hunt in the Night, that there is a great many together, they make the most hideous and frightful Noise, that was ever heard.”
“When they hunt in the night, they make the most hideous noise”
“Think about it,” says Cornelia Hutt of the , a conservation group based in North Carolina. “Wolves are scary-looking and have big teeth and golden eyes. They are one of the few animals that are capable of killing humans.” North American wolves rarely attack people but it does happen. As recently as 2005, a Canadian student was killed by wolves while working in a mining camp in Saskatchewan.
Fear of starvation was an equally powerful incentive to wipe out wolves. Both colonists and wolves relied on deer to fill their bellies, and when overhunting sent deer numbers plummeting the settlers blamed the wolves. It is no surprise that early colonists believed the only good wolf was a dead wolf.
While settlers made little distinction between species, grey wolves fared better than their red and eastern cousins because they ranged further north, into regions where there were few people. The more slender red and eastern wolves – which ranged from Florida in the south to Ontario and Quebec in the north and westwards to central Texas and Missouri – were killed in huge numbers.
The US declared the red wolf extinct in the wild in 1980, and the 2000 or so eastern wolves that survive in Canada are now designated of special concern. Some wildlife geneticists argue that Canada’s eastern wolves and the US’s red wolf are the same species, but no one disputes the scale of their slaughter.
Records show the killings began almost immediately the settlers arrived: in 1630, just 10 years after the Mayflower arrived on the coast of Massachusetts, the colony’s administrators began to offer a bounty for each wolf killed. In Ontario, a wolf bounty introduced in 1793 wasn’t lifted until 1972.
By the 17th century it was possible to make a living as a wolf bounty hunter and by the following century wolfers were taking a terrible toll. “Wolfers hired by the livestock industry and the federal government laid out strychnine-poisoned meat lines 150 miles long,” says Hutt. “Wolves were shot, poisoned, trapped, clubbed and set on fire.”
Wolfers and landowners threaded baited fish hooks deep into wolf dens, waiting for the pups to swallow the hooks before dragging them out and killing them. For the settlers, simply killing the animals was not always enough: they wanted revenge. They dug pit-traps and filled them with sharp stakes so wolves might fall in and impale themselves. Injured wolves were pulled out, hamstrung and then thrown to packs of dogs to be torn apart. Sometimes they cut off a wolf’s lower jaw and set it free to starve to death.
Still more wolves succumbed to starvation when their forest home was cleared to make way for farms. Soon, another more insidious threat emerged. Coyotes from the prairies to the west began moving into traditional wolf territory in the late 1800s. Coyotes, which thrive in areas cleared of forest, arrived in large numbers and began cross-breeding with the remaining wolves. Within a few generations, thousands of years of reproductive isolation had broken down, diluting the red wolves’ already diminished gene pool.
By the early 1970s, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) could find only 400 red wolves and hybrid wolf-coyotes eking out an existence along the Texas-Louisiana border. Biologists identified just 14 genetically pure individuals of the right sex and age to start a captive-breeding programme. In a last-ditch effort to save the species, the animals were sent to islands off the coast of South Carolina and Florida – away from coyotes, cars and gun-toting humans.
In 1987, third and fourth-generation descendants of in North Carolina, making them the first predators restored to the wild after being declared extinct. There are now about 100 red wolves living in the refuge and on neighbouring public and private lands, and another 200 in captive-breeding programmes run by zoos across the US. The USFWS is trying to prevent hybridisation by sterilising coyotes that live near the wolf populations. “The number of coyotes out there is so large that if we allow interbreeding to continue, we believe the red wolf will be genetically swamped out of existence,” says Bud Fazio of the .
Fazio and his colleagues aim to increase the number of wolves in the wild to a more sustainable 220, with an additional 330 in captive-breeding facilities. Yet there are long-running debates about whether they are fighting a losing battle. Some wildlife experts maintain that there is simply not enough forest left to support the animals and that development pressures threaten what little habitat remains.
Changing public attitudes may help. In 1997 a team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, surveyed 500 households in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. They found that 75 per cent supported the restoration of the red wolf at existing sites in North Carolina and 70 per cent liked the idea of establishing another recovery site within the wolves’ historic range.
Critics of the recovery project point out that regardless of softening attitudes, landowners continue to kill wolves. Under US law, it is legal to kill red wolves if they threaten livestock or pets, although government compensation for lost livestock has done much to increase tolerance. “Nowadays most people accept or tolerate the wolves,” says Fazio. But there are some families in North Carolina whose roots stretch back centuries. “Their attitudes don’t change and they’ll take out a wolf when they see one.”
Yet Nina Fascione, a , is optimistic about the wolves’ future. “Wolves are adaptable,” she says.
Meanwhile, a similar debate about the future of wolves is taking place in Canada, where conservationists are asking how to protect eastern wolves, many of which carry coyote genes. Should they try to stop these wolves from hybridising with coyotes and, if so, how? Or does hybridisation give the eastern wolf its best chance of survival – albeit in a different form – in a changed ecosystem?
At the moment, there are more questions than answers because so little is known about the natural history of these animals. In the case of the red wolf, scientists only began to study it once it was on the brink of extinction, had hybridised extensively and was no longer living in its natural habitat.
Still, conservationists have high hopes that initiatives such as the Red Wolf Recovery Project could right a historic wrong. “It’s helped us to kind of purge a collective guilt,” says Hutt.
