Test Confirms Wolf Killed In Kansas Last Month Tuesday, January 29, 2013
A state parks official says tests have confirmed that an animal killed by hunters in Trego County in December was a wolf.
DNA testing conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed the animal was a western Great Lakes wolf, a subspecies of the gray wolf.
Ron Kaufman, a spokesman for the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, says officials haven't determined if the wolf was wild or had been in captivity.
The Hays Daily News reported Monday the last confirmed killing of a gray wolf in Kansas was during the winter of 1938-39.
The animal's body has been turned over to the federal wildlife agency. Gray wolves are a protected species outside extreme northern United States.
The hunters have not been identified.
With all the cats, wolves, boa constrictors, and now bigfoot roaming the prairies it is amazing we don't lose calves, sheep, and livestock! Maybe they have all mutated into vegetarians!
SPALDING, Neb.
(AP) - A gray wolf was shot near Spalding in the state's first confirmed wolf sighting in 90 years, state wildlife officials said. A coyote hunter shot the wolf Dec. 15 in a farm field near Spalding, about 55 miles straight north of Grand Island. The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission said Wednesday the 100-pound male canine, which was turned in by the hunter, was recently identified by federal officials as a pure gray wolf.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is conducting a criminal investigation to determine the circumstances of the animal's death. Gray wolves are a protected species under state and federal laws. The wolves recently were down-listed by federal authorities from an endangered species to a threatened species, which allows ranchers to kill wolves they catch attacking livestock. Under the previous endangered species designation, killing a wolf carried a maximum $100,000 fine and a one-year jail sentence. The Fish and Wildlife Service has determined the animal originated from a population of wolves found in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The last confirmed wolf sighting in Nebraska was in 1913, when a carcass was recovered near Oconto, said Richard Bischof, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission's furbearer and nongame mammal program manager. There were reported sightings of the animals in the state as late as 1920, but none were confirmed, Bischof said. Gray wolves are native to Nebraska, but they were killed off in the early 1900s by the widespread use of poison, traps and shooting for fur harvest and population control. Their numbers in Nebraska started to dwindle years earlier as the state's bison population - the wolves' main food source - began to disappear.
Today, there are an estimated 300,000 captive wolves and wolf-dogs in the United States. "We occasionally receive reports of possible wolves in Nebraska, but it is sometimes difficult to positively identify a wolf-like animal," Bischof said. "Wolves and domestic dogs are the same species and readily inter-breed, resulting in wolf-dog offspring." Recent efforts to restore wolves to part of their former range in the United States may result in more wolves immigrating to Nebraska, Bischof said. Wolves have been reintroduced in states as close as Wyoming and Minnesota. "The commission does not support the artificial release of wolves or wolf-dogs into the wild in Nebraska and has no wolf reintroduction plans," Bischof said.
If they have not seen it, it cannot exist.
Skeet...we pull our heads out of the sand when there's solid proof...as in this wolf. :-)
