Petition: Every Red Wolf Alive Descends From 14 Animals. This Year, Four Litters Were Born.

The red wolf holds a distinction no other animal wants. In 1980 it became the first species deliberately taken out of the wild in order to save it from extinction: the US Fish and Wildlife Service captured every red wolf it could find, roughly 400 canids in Texas and Louisiana, and of those only 14 met the criteria to define the species. Every red wolf alive today descends from those fourteen animals. In 1987 four breeding pairs were released at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina, making the red wolf the first carnivore ever brought back from extinction in the wild to its native range. This year, four litters were born, 23 pups in total, with roughly 12 to 16 surviving their first months. That is genuinely good news, and it is also fragile: there are only around 22 to 26 adult red wolves left in the wild, all of them in five counties of one peninsula. Please sign the petition supporting the Red Wolf Recovery Program.

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The recovery has been done before, which is what makes the decline so frustrating. By 2011 the wild population had reached around 120 to 130 animals across 1.7 million acres, and Fish and Wildlife once described it as a model for predator reintroductions. Then it collapsed. A sharp rise in illegal gunshot deaths, vehicle strikes, hybridization with coyotes and a series of management decisions took the population from over a hundred to fewer than thirty. Gunshots and vehicles remain the leading causes of death today. One detail deserves more attention than it gets: the recovery area sits roughly three feet above sea level, which means the only wild red wolf population on Earth is directly in the path of sea level rise. There is also a model worth expanding. Three of this year’s litters were born in the wild and one on private land through the Prey for the Pack program, which pays landowners who allow red wolves to live on their property, turning a species people once shot into one they have reason to protect. One Green Planet has covered what happens when wolves are left unprotected in our petition on the Wyoming wolf case, and the recovery program’s own data is published by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Fourteen animals became a hundred once. It can happen again.

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