Jacques Mallet killed what he thought was a giant coyote at Saint Simon on New Brunswick's Acadian Peninsula. Because it weighed 86 pounds, it would have been the largest coyote on record, but everyone, including Mallet, thinks this animal is a wolf. DNA tests have been ordered to see exactly what it is.
The initial report from the CBC found that Jacques Mallet was getting ready to kill his second coyote. He had been hunting the robust, deer hunting Eastern coyotes of the New Brunswick for two years now. He’d killed one last year, and now, he was stalking Canis latrans— “the barking dog”– at St. Simon on the Acadian Peninsula.
The story that follows starts out routine but soon becomes a bit screwy:
He saw a big one, fired, dropped it, but when he came upon his kill, he was shocked at what lay before him.
The great gray canid that lay before him was massive– much larger than any coyote ever seen in these parts or anywhere else.
The CBC reports Mallet is almost certain that this animal is a wolf:
“I said, ‘Oh my God, maybe that’s not a coyote. That’s a wolf. I don’t know what it is.’ I was quite surprised.”
Wolves are officially extinct in the province. They officially disappeared in 1876, so if this animals is determined to be a wolf, then Mallet will have to give it up to the provincial wildlife authorities.
However, one should keep in mind that virtually all coyotes in Eastern North America are part wolf, and virtually all wolves in Eastern Canada have coyote mtDNA, which has led to some foolish assertions about these animals– most specifically that they represent a unique “Eastern wolf” species.
So I hope they aren’t just doing an mtDNA test.
That is almost guaranteed to result in this animal being declared a coyote.
Y-chromosome and microsatellite analyses are going to be needed to determine this animal’s identity.
But wolves are coming back in Eastern Canada and in Northern New England. Reintroductions are not necessary.
They are going to come on their own volition.
And that’s the best way.
If wolves come into a region, they are going to know from their experiences on the way what the proper behavior is and how to avoid humans.
Wolves can be an in area and cause very few problems, as we’ve seen with Germany’s wolves.
But if they are introduced, there will always be attacks on whether one has introduced the wrong subspecies and these wolves may or may not know how to behave in a new environment. And they might start killing stock.
I’m only in favor of wolf reintroduction if it is absolutely impossible for wolves to get to a region on their own.
Mexican wolves were extinct in the wild until relatively recently, so they had to be reintroduced.
This wolf in New Brunswick suggests that wolves are more than capable of recolonizing the East on their own.
And I really don’t see what’s wrong with that.
Even if these wolves do occasionally bred with coyotes in the wild, this hybridization occurred in the past, even before European colonization. The wolves of the Western Great Lakes have an introgression of coyote genes that was estimated to have happened between 600 and 900 years ago.
Nature has created a species complex between wolves and coyotes in North America.
It’s just very hard for people to see that there is not hard edge separating these two species.
It’s muddled.
See related posts:
“Species complex”. That’s just wonderful. Let’s give it a moving frontier or DMZ of varying width. It may be environmentally important, too, for controlling the populations of prey, such as the white-tailed deer, as prey of different sizes move around colonizing new areas.
It occurs to me that the wolf is all that stands between the coyote and Asia. Colonization of Asia by coyotes could spell the end for like-sized canids in Eurasia/Africa.
What’s sad and scary about this story is that this fellow killed the animal before he identified it. Apparently that is the usual way it’s done, however, as the hunter rarely sees a whole animal.
I am sure the Canadian animal right activists will very soon be up against Newfies of these kinds killing everything that moves, flies, crawls or swims of these ‘majestic’ proportions.
On the other hand, I am not sure what types of drugs he is on this Junky Mallet.
New Brunswick, not Newfoundland.
Thanks for correction. A friend of mine living on the Rock brought a moose down yesterday and I confused the two provinces because of that news.
On another note, it was at Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, few years ago that two coyotes killed a young talented country musician while she decided to hike on a trail all alone.
Are you aware of any reserach on coyotes there? Are they really coyotes or coyote-wolf mix. Coyotes in our GTA our just average coyotes.
I live in Georgia and noticed that some of the coyotes here sure do look like red wolves. I’ve seen some with exceptionally reddish coats. A trail cam photo posted on the Georgia Outdoor News Forum caught one that was black with a white spot on its chest–exactly how many red wolves found in the southeast were described from the 18th and 19th centuries.
BTW, I’ve just discovered your blog. It’s fascinating. I’ve written 3 articles focusing on canids that you might find interesting. I’ll list the titles. The articles can easily be found using a google search. I’m not linking them so you won’t think it is spam.
“Did the dhole (Cuon alpinus) Range into Southeastern North America during the Pleistocene?”
“Of Lycanthrope and Dire Wolves”
“Pleistocene Fossil Canid Ratios Recorded in the University of Florida Database”
The black coloration, according to Dr. Robert Wayne of UCLA, in both wolves in coyotes comes from hybridization with dogs.
The black wolves of North America have been found to have descended from a melanistic mutation that, if you look at the mutations on genes around it, shows that the mutation is oldest in dogs and first entered the North America wolf population 12,000 years ago.
BTW, there is some evidence in Arizona, that ancient Americans did domesticate dire wolves.
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/did-the-clovis-people-domesticate-dire-wolves/
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