Wolf populations in Spain ‘not out of the woods yet’: Europe votes to downgrade protection status of struggling predator

From the Olive Press:

WOLF populations in Spain have had their protection status downgraded after a Europe-wide vote by the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats.

Spain was one of only two member states in the EU to vote against the European Commission’s proposal to move wolves from a ‘strictly protected species’ to a ‘protected species.’

But since the other 25 members voted in favour, Spain’s vote at the Bern Convention was lost since the EU votes as a bloc.

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Wolf pups born

From presspubs.com:

Officials announced the birth of several gray wolf puppies April 27 at the Wildlife Science Center in Columbus.

The mother of these pups is the daughter of a wolf from Yellowstone National Park. The Wildlife Science Center is sharing two of the puppies with the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minn., in an effort to further wolf education in Minnesota and beyond. The remainder of the litter will stay at the Center.

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Colorado Reintroduced Wolves. They Might Have the Wrong Personalities to Succeed

From SentientMedia.org:

A growing body of research suggests animal personalities can impact reintroduction to the wild. When wolves were first released in remote parts of Grand County, Colorado, one year ago, researcher Marc Bekoff noticed differences in the way the individual wolves reacted. While two of the five wolves remained cautious — staying in their holding cages until coaxed out — another bolted as soon as the opportunity arose. A growing body of research says these variations in behavior can be explained by the personality of the wolves in question, but researchers and government officials don’t necessarily agree on how to take these personalities into account.

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As California’s wolf population claws its way back, some ranchers are nervous

From USA Today:

SAN FRANCISCO – The last wild wolf in California was shot in 1924. It wasn’t until 2011 that another padded across the Oregon border.

Today, gray wolves are making a major comeback in the Golden State. This year the state is home to nine packs containing an estimated 70 wolves, up from 44 last year. Most live in the northeastern part of the state, though there is one pack about 200 miles north of Los Angeles.

State wildlife staff believe at least 30 pups were born this year, meaning more packs are likely to form in the coming years.

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Europe’s growing wolf problem

From The Week:

Plans are underway to allow EU farmers to kill wolves but is the predator being unfairly attacked?

In 2022, a grey wolf in Germany’s Lower Saxony region killed a pony called Dolly. It’s not unknown for wolves to kill other animals but this one had messed with the wrong pony: Dolly was the beloved pet of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

Dolly’s death-by-wolf set in motion a chain of events that culminated in an historic vote in Strasbourg this week, which modified the protection status of wolves. It’s seen as a “major win” for farmers who want “more freedom to shoot animals that threaten their livestock”, said Politico.

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Ancient Wolf’s Diet Suggests He Was a Pet

FromNewser:

Animal in Alaska ate lots of salmon, likely from humans, study suggests.

When did wolf become dog? It’s a debated question and central to a new study presenting what appears to be the earliest evidence of the human-dog relationship in the Americas. It comes from the 12,000-year-old bones of a canid—a wolf, coyote, or dog—found at Swan Point in interior Alaska. This canid, living far from the coast, ate salmon on the regular, and researchers think it was getting the fish from humans. Other ancient canids in the region did not eat salmon. This suggests, according to researchers, that the animal was living with and being fed by humans, or at least that there was some kind of mutually beneficial relationship, some 2,000 years earlier than previously known, per a release.

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The only successful attempt: humanity has tried to domesticate wolves several times, and modern dogs are the only successful result

From ITCommunity:

For thousands of years, the line between wolves and dogs has been blurred. Groups of people in different parts of the world, independently of each other, have repeatedly tried to domesticate wild wolves. However, we can see the result of only one such attempt today. A recent study shows that even after dogs spread across Eurasia and the Americas, people in what is now Alaska interacted with a strange mix of dogs, wolves, wolf-dog hybrids, and some coyotes.

Archaeologist François Lano from the University of Arizona and his colleagues studied 111 sets of dog and wolf bones from archaeological sites in the interior of Alaska.

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Opposing Colorado wolf groups take reintroduction fight to Canada

From The Coloradoan:

Colorado’s wolves have not had a confirmed livestock depredation in nearly three months, the longest stretch since the beginning of the year.

But the controversy over reintroducing wolves continues to fester with opposing groups of the issue taking their fight to Canada, where the next 15 wolves are scheduled to be captured for release in Colorado early next year.

Many of the more than 20 organizations — mostly representing agriculture — that petitioned the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to pause the reintroduction in September sent a letter Nov. 26 to British Columbia’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship.

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World Wildlife Fund warns of dire consequences after Bern Convention weakens wolf protection

From AA.com.tr:

GENEVA

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has sharply criticized a decision by the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention to lower the protection status of wolves, calling it a “dangerous” setback for conservation efforts in Europe.

The Council of Europe’s Bern Convention Committee has adopted an EU proposal to modify the status of wolf protection from “strictly protected fauna species” to “protected fauna species.”

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Late Pleistocene onset of mutualistic human/canid (Canis spp.) relationships in subarctic Alaska

From Science Advances:

Large canids (wolves, dogs, and coyote) and people form a close relationship in northern (subarctic and arctic) socioecological systems. Here, we document the antiquity of this bond and the multiple ways it manifested in interior Alaska, a region key to understanding the peopling of the Americas and early northern lifeways. We compile original and existing genomic, isotopic, and osteological canid data from archaeological, paleontological, and modern sites.

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