The wolf pup that was taken from a wild pack in Idaho by some well meaning campers who thought he was a stray puppy has found a new home.
The pup, who has been named Boise, has been sent to Busch Gardens Virginia, where he’s been placed with a German short-haired pointer foster mother and two melanistic wolf foster siblings that were born at a captive-breeding facility in Montana.
Attempts to locate Boise’s pack were failures.
My guess is that Boise may have been born to one of female wolves in his pack who was not the pair-bonded breeding females. Pups born to these females often have a low survival rate. They aren’t born in the main den, and it’s not unusual for all the puppies born to these females to die.
It may have happened that the main breeding female’s pups were born first and as they matured, the pack moved them to another den. If Boise’s mother had been one of these females, she would have also moved, and she may have had a very hard time taking care of him. She would have to help attend the main breeding female’s litter, which would have been some distance from Boise’s den.
And eventually, she may have had to abandon him in order to keep up with her pack.
Yellowstone wolves often have multiple breeding females, and there is a relatively high survival rate among the pups born to these females that are not the main breeding females in the pack.
But in most wolf populations, if a wolf pup isn’t born to that female’s litter, his chances of survival are pretty low.
For a pup he looks like he has an intense and “aware” look in his eyes… I guess that is a survival thing…
I think I will be seeing him in early fall, if he is on display with his family.
I hope those people that took him at least feel guilty about what they did.
Keeping in mind Retrieverman’s calculated guess in his blog above, I think it turned out better for the pup to be taken as otherwise he would have perished.
It’s awfully hard to turn your back on an orphaned young animal. Even though they may have intellectually thought that it wasn’t really an orphan. And remember, they thought that it was an abandoned (dog) puppy when they found it; it’s my understanding that they did not realize it was a wolf pup at first. I can understand how someone could make the mistake, if they were not well-informed about wildlife. They probably feel terrible now about separating the pup from its mother, but at the time I’m sure they felt they were just saving a puppy’s life.
I’m not saying it was the right thing for them to do, just that I can understand why they did it and I for one don’t condemn them for it.
I came to your blog from Pennypup’s, and I’ve been reading through. I heard about Boise here on Dogster, when the story first “broke”, and had seen no followup anywhere.
The glare that he’s giving in several of the pictures in that article seems to confirm my suspicion that he was getting a lot of cameras shoved in his face. Or, he’s just playing, and I’m overanalyzing.