a little good news: wolf recovery

I enjoy the video clips posted on Twitter by the Wolf Conservation Center in New York.

A local newspaper, though, recently printed an article about wolves in Minnesota and the International Wolf Center here.  Reminder: These are wild animals, not pets-in-waiting. As the article quotes a worker, "It's the bottle-fed wolves that will kill you. The ones that were born and raised wild never seem to care enough about a human to try."

Some fun wolf facts:

• Minnesota is the only contiguous-48 state to never murder all of the wolves to extinction within its territory.
   
• Minnesota now has almost as many wolves as all of the other lower-48 states combined.
   
• Minnesota wolf pups are featured in a new Disney series, "America the Beautiful".
   
• Our state Department Of Natural Resources notes that wolves account for only about 5% of our deer mortality, but limiting deer is vital to maintaining a viable ecosystem for many other species of animals and plants here.
   
• The idea of the "alpha wolf" is wrong, and the researcher who helped popularize the phrase now regrets it.  The alpha pair is likely the mother and father of a pack, and they work to ensure fairness within the group, not mere submission to their whims.
   
• Wolves are actually quite benevolent, with males raising other pups as their own.  They are also very cooperative.  The story of "wolf 21" is an interesting study in these ideas, including death-by-bereavement for a lost mate.

They're still beautiful animals, though, and significant to the co-evolution of humans and dogs... and it may have been woman rather than man that facilitated this process.