Visitor Counter

hitwebcounter web counter
Visitors Since Blog Created in March 2010

Click Below to:

Add Blog to Favorites

Coyotes-Wolves-Cougars.blogspot.com

Grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars/ mountain lions,bobcats, wolverines, lynx, foxes, fishers and martens are the suite of carnivores that originally inhabited North America after the Pleistocene extinctions. This site invites research, commentary, point/counterpoint on that suite of native animals (predator and prey) that inhabited The Americas circa 1500-at the initial point of European exploration and subsequent colonization. Landscape ecology, journal accounts of explorers and frontiersmen, genetic evaluations of museum animals, peer reviewed 20th and 21st century research on various aspects of our "Wild America" as well as subjective commentary from expert and layman alike. All of the above being revealed and discussed with the underlying goal of one day seeing our Continent rewilded.....Where big enough swaths of open space exist with connective corridors to other large forest, meadow, mountain, valley, prairie, desert and chaparral wildlands.....Thereby enabling all of our historic fauna, including man, to live in a sustainable and healthy environment. - Blogger Rick

Subscribe via email to get updates

Enter your email address:

Receive New Posting Alerts

(A Maximum of One Alert Per Day)

Monday, August 30, 2010

We looked yesterday at the historical record of bison populations in Yellowstone..............Today we look at the history of our wanton killing of wolves since 1600 in the USA

Only 10 years after the Mayflower landed, the Massachusetts Bay , the demand for pelts sent hundreds of hunters out to kill . Wolves were shot, poisoned, trapped, clubbed, set on fire and Barry Holstun Lopez writes in Of 1870 and 1877, bounty hunters employed by the United States government killed approximately 55,000 wolves 385,000 wolf deaths in only seven years. between 1883 and 1918, 80,730 wolves were exterminated and $342,764 in bounties , with westward expansion in full-swing, "the United States Biological Survey Colorado offered a $50 bounty per wolf in 1909, while the offered $150 . Many of the bounties stood for years. In Ontario, Canada, the wolf western states were paying over $1 million dollars per year in predator control.

The Eradication of the Wolf
A History of Unfounded Hatred that nearly completely exterminating the
species from North America.

Unknown date: On a Saturday afternoon in Texas...three men on horseback rode
down a female red wolf and threw a lasso over her neck. When she gripped the
rope with her teeth to keep the noose from closing, they dragged her around the
prairie until they'd broken her teeth out. Then while two of them stretched the
animal between their horses with ropes, the third man beat her to death with a pair
of fence pliers. The wolf was taken around to a few bars in a pickup and finally
thrown in a roadside ditch.
The wolf was at one time, the most widely distributed large land mammal in the
world. Within North America, gray wolves formerly ranged from coast to coast
throughout Canada down through Mexico. The gray wolf inhabited the North
American continent long before any humans did -- for about 40 million years.
Before Europeans settled the US, wolves roamed the country.

The first documented wolf bounty was reportedly paid sometime between A.D. 46-
120, when Greek officials awarded five silver drachmas to a hunter for bringing in a
dead male wolf. Years later, in France, the Statutes of Charlemagne (A.D. 742-814)
recorded that "two hunters were to be employed in each French community to
destroy wolves." During the Middle Ages, Europeans bred large wolf-hounds and
mastiffs for the specific purpose of killing wolves and keeping wolves away from
farms.

Nov. 9, 1630:
The Massachusetts Colony was the first in North America to begin offering a bounty on every wolf
killed. Wolves were effectively eliminated from the eastern United States by the end
of the eighteenth century.

In the 19th century, ranchers moved into the western
plains to take advantage of cheap and abundant grazing land. Livestock took over
and the wolves' natural prey base retreated. Wolves began depredating on livestock and this led to a massive campaign
to exterminate wolves completely in the west. Professional "wolfers" working for the livestock industry laid outstrychnine-poisoned meat lines up to 150 miles longinoculated with mange, a painful and often fatal skin disease caused by mites.

Wolves And Men, "[people] even poisoned themselves, and burned down their own property torching the woods to get
rid of wolf havens."
Between

each year, for a total of

In the state of Montana alone,

were rewarded.

In 1907, Washington declared the extermination of the wolf as the paramount objective of the government,"and President Theodore Roosevelt labeled wolves "the beast[s] of waste and
destruction."
Government hunters destroyed the last known wolf in the Yellowstone
area in the 1940s.
In 1948, the Alberta government unleashed "an astonishing arsenal of
poison" on the wolves in that province. There is no record of the number
of wolves that were killed by the strychnine pellets, and 800 sodium fluoroacetate poison bait stations,
but among the "incidental killings" were 246,800 coyotes.
By the 1970s, only a few hundred wolves remained in the lower 48 states
(Northeast Minnesota and Isle Royale in Michigan), occupying less than
three percent of their former range.

The Move Westward: A partial timeline of the enactment of wolf bounties:
1630 Massachusetts Bay Colony
1632 Virginia Bay Colony
1695 South Carolina
1697 New Jersey
1793 Upper Canada (Ontario & Quebec)
1839 Newfoundland
1840 Iowa
1843 Oregon Territory
1861 Quebec
1871 Washington
1878 Manitoba
1884 Montana
1893 Arizona & New Mexico Territory
1899 Alberta & Saskatchewan
1900 British Columbia
1915 Alaska

Become an active voice for the wolf and
join the fight in securing their future survival in North America!

Alliance for the Wild Rockies
Renee Van Camp, Wolf Program Director
PO Box 8731
Missoula, MT 59807


406-721-5420
renee@wildrockiesalliance.org

No comments: