First, people exterminated the Tasmanian tiger, and now they are wiping out gray wolves in the wild.

The extermination of wolves is a massive problem for wildlife. But people do not stop! In many regions of the world, wolves have been wiped out completely; in others, they continue to be destroyed on an unthinkable scale, with an entire industry built around it, including state bounty payments for the “shooting of the gray parasite.” And where there is money, there are vested interests that will justify anything, as long as the eradication of wolves and the payout of bounties continue.

Everything is ignored: biology, common sense, statements by scientists, and expert opinion.

I want to once again quote Doctor of Sciences, the outstanding Russian field scientist Nikolai Konstantinovich Zheleznov:

“When considering the relationship of the wolf with other animal species, with its prey, we perhaps have only a generally qualitative view of what is traditionally regarded as its negative role. For humans, this becomes immediately obvious and tangible. But we still do not know the many quantitative direct and reverse connections it has within ecosystems in each region, especially in our country with its widely varying natural and physical-geographical conditions. Revealing these connections would help determine its positive or negative significance in the ecosystems of Northern Asia and the entire Far East.

For this, there must be a unified research program not only for the wolf, but also for other large predators, taking into account ecological, physical-geographical, and socio-economic factors, as well as regional features affecting their place in the natural complexes of each region.

And if, because of a lack of knowledge and approaches to studying it, humanity’s past attitude toward the wolf can be forgiven, then today’s attitude cannot be forgiven when it remains trapped in outdated ideas and is seen only through the sights of a hunting shotgun, a rifled carbine with optics, or aerial shooting from helicopters.

The wolf is a highly significant biological component of nature; in its natural habitat, it largely determines the overall state of biodiversity in all ecosystems where it lives.

In our time, the wolf, not as a predator and direct competitor of man, has a right to exist. And it is long past time to remove it from the list of negative species, as an ‘enemy’ of man.”

But alas, in our time nothing can be heard in the Russian Taiga except the clinking of coins and the clatter of rifles: the large-scale destruction of wolves — the orderlies of wild nature — is underway. And nobody seems to care.

When we speak about something, it is best to rely on real experience. And today I want to tell you about a wolf that was already exterminated completely — simply erased from the face of the Earth, together with millions of years of evolutionary history.

Its extermination was justified almost word for word by the very same arguments that are being used today in the case of the gray wolf. The only difference is that our wolf can still try to retreat from humans, as some open spaces remain, whereas the wolf I am about to speak of lived in a confined territory with no possibility of escape. That is why it was destroyed.

Ah, what a magnificent creature it was! Nature is an artist, a creator, and a master craftsman. It created the thylacine, or as it is often called, the “Tasmanian tiger,” a large marsupial wolf. It was a predator, not quite a wolf, but a true creation of nature from prehistoric times that nearly survived into the modern era. And it would still be alive today, if not for people.

The thylacine belonged to the order Dasyuromorphia — a group of marsupial carnivores that also includes the Tasmanian devil, quolls, and the numbat. In fact, it was not a close relative of wolves or dogs at all; their similarity is a striking example of convergent evolution, when distant lineages independently arrive at a similar body form under the pressure of similar ecological challenges. At the same time, by studying genomic data, scientists determined that the common ancestor of the thylacine and modern canids lived about 160 million years ago: that was when their lineages diverged. That is how ancient this species was.

I am saying this so that you understand what people did — they simply took millions of years of evolutionary history and destroyed it, erased it completely. The thylacine combined utterly unique traits: stripes across the rear part of its body like a tiger, a pouch on the belly for raising young like a kangaroo, yet outwardly it resembled a wolf or a dog.

Previously, the thylacine lived on mainland Australia, in Tasmania, and on the islands of New Guinea. By the twentieth century, the population survived only on the large island of Tasmania, where it could still live in open forests, hide in marshy scrublands, and move through grassy spaces. The thylacine was a nocturnal, secretive predator, hunting from ambush and attacking its prey with a short rush. It fed on small mammals and birds.

In those years, colonizers came to Australia and began settling the mainland and, accordingly, the island of Tasmania, where the Tasmanian wolf lived. Since farmers and authorities needed vast territories for agriculture to support the Europeans arriving by ship, they began accusing the thylacine of allegedly attacking livestock, and under this pretext the large-scale extermination of the predator began. As early as the nineteenth century — which by historical standards was not long ago at all — farmers and the colonial administration established private and state bounties for shooting thylacines.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the first private bounties began to be paid to farmers for thylacine trophies. Bring the authorities a hide, and you got money! Farmers were delighted and began shouting that “this wolf has become completely outrageous, we are losing livestock, it must be destroyed at once.” It was convenient to blame sheep losses on a predator — and then get paid for it as well.

In 1840, the Van Diemen’s Land Company announced the start of its private bounty program for the destruction of thylacines. This led to a frenzy: many people took up weapons and, hoping to get money, went out into the wild in search of wolves so they could skin them.

The hysteria kept growing.

In 1886–88, the government decided to join in, and the Parliament of Tasmania established official state bounties for the destruction of the “vile bloodthirsty wolf.” They paid 1 pound sterling for an adult animal and 10 shillings for cubs.

To give you an idea of the financial motive, if you convert these bounties into modern money, it would be roughly 18–20 thousand rubles for an adult animal or 9–10 thousand rubles for a pup. In other words, almost exactly the same prices that Russian authorities now pay for the destruction of wolves. It is as though no one even tried to think up a new scenario — they simply copied that historical model and reproduced it in our time.

Well then, people rushed into the wilderness and began slaughtering thylacines. The Tasmanian Parliament’s program produced results: from 1888 to 1909 alone, people killed 2,180 thylacines and received payments for their hides. And that is an enormous number, because over the course of a century about 3,500 individuals were killed in total. In other words, when there were no financial rewards, people were not especially eager to kill the unfortunate striped wolf. But as soon as bounties were introduced, they took up weapons and went in search of trophies.

And then, on September 7, 1936 — which is not long ago at all — the last thylacine died at Hobart Zoo. And to make matters worse, the authorities had by then introduced protected status and banned the killing of thylacines. Do you know when? Two months before the death of the last individual in the zoo.

TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE COMPLETE EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES.

In modern times, scientists carefully studied thylacine skeletons and found that they were physically incapable of killing people’s livestock. Computer modeling showed that the thylacine’s jaws were too weak to hold and kill an adult sheep.

I studied scientific data on European wolves as well. There, they have recently begun destroying them again, and even scientists who had spent decades fighting to protect the population were shocked by the news. In places with a high availability of cattle and horses, analysis of wolf scat showed that domestic livestock makes up only about 3% of the consumed biomass. And this refers specifically to places with extensive farming and abundant domestic stock. As a rule, this is almost a statistical error, since a wolf pack may simply scavenge animals that died of natural causes.

The wolf is a social predator. There is an alpha pair and offspring. Killed individuals are not replaced instantly. According to modern scientific studies, the death of even one family member sharply undermines the pack’s stability. Scientists say that when one wolf in a pack dies, the group’s chances of surviving to the end of the year fall by 27%, and the probability of successful reproduction drops by 22%. If the leader dies, pack survival decreases by 73%, and reproduction by 49%.

Think about these numbers! People are PROVOKING THE DISINTEGRATION OF WOLF PACKS, and as a consequence, starving inexperienced wolves begin appearing near settlements, which fuels rumors of rising wolf numbers and leads to even greater destruction.

I came across a quote from a scientist who studied wolves in Yellowstone, USA:

“If you kill the wrong wolf at the wrong time, that pack may simply disappear.”

And who in government takes this into account? Who is even asking any serious questions at all?

People break up wolf packs, destroy populations, and provoke the appearance of solitary animals and small groups near human settlements. Moreover, the destruction of packs and the reduction of the population lead to the destruction of wolves at the genetic level. The species is simply diluted, including through hybridization with dogs. I found a solid scientific study on wolves in Italy, where researchers noted that nearly half of wolves (46.7%) carry traces of dog genes. In essence, when we are told about wolves appearing around settlements, neither the authorities, nor the hunting community, nor especially ordinary local residents have any idea who is in front of them: a true wild wolf or a hybrid incapable of living in the wild and likely to return to people.

Under normal conditions, wolves do not interbreed this way when packs are whole and stable. This happens only in a critical situation, when people fragment packs and leave isolated individuals alive, individuals that begin living close to humans, dwelling around garbage dumps, trying to survive. And in females, the mechanism of “survive at any cost” is triggered — which leads to mixing with stray dogs that people have thrown onto the streets.

This could be discussed for a long time. I recommend that all our Allies read my book “The Right to Life” in defense of wolves — about what is happening, on what scale, which wolves have already been completely exterminated by humans, and which ones people continue to finish off. The book is free of charge, with no commercial motive whatsoever in our shared Mission in the struggle for Life.

Download the book for free

The experience of the exterminated thylacine is a living example of the fact that state governance and human thinking do not change. No one learns from past mistakes. Both thylacines and wolves are unlawfully placed outside the law, guided by the old paradigm of the “dangerous predator.”

Unfortunately, the destruction of the orderlies of wild nature continues right now. And as Professor Zheleznov said, it is urgently necessary to launch a unified program for the protection of wolves, otherwise they simply will not remain — just as the thylacines once did not remain. And if we fail to find ways to protect them, if we do not stop this slaughter, at some point we will see news reports about the death of the last gray wolf in one of the country’s zoos.

© PAVEL PASHKOV