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

http://www.wildrockiesalliance.org/issues/wolves/index.html

406-721-5420

renee@wildrockiesalliance.org