Senator Targets Struggling Red Wolf Population

[douglas9]

North Carolina’s junior senator, Thom Tillis, wants the state’s endangered red wolves to be declared extinct—again.

Tillis, a Republican, was behind a single paragraph in a 148-page spending bill of the Senate Appropriations Committee that could doom the species.

“There is a less than respectful history of dialogue between folks in North Carolina and the Fish & Wildlife Service,” Tillis said in 2016.

Red wolves were once found across the eastern United States, but by the 1970s they were only found in parts of southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. Red wolves were one of the first animals listed under the Endangered Species Act. They were declared extinct in the wild in 1980 but reintroduced in North Carolina after a breeding program in zoos.

The animals, which weigh 45 to 80 pounds as adults, are notoriously shy. They eat deer, rats, rabbits and other animals. Red wolves are in five northeastern North Carolina counties, but their numbers have dropped to less than 45 in the wild from about 130 in the mid-2000s.

https://www.dcreport.org/2017/12/01/senator-targets-struggling-red-wolf-population/

[2naSalit]

1. That program...

has been plagued with opposition for some time. They look much like coyotes and will interbreed with them as well... coyote hunting is a big pastime there it seems. That and the military wants to take over the peninsula where the recovery program is located. I think it's rather brash for a Senator to declare a species extinct on a whim.

[Lokilooney]

2. A "Red wolf" is actually just a Gray wolf/Coyote hybrid.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgddd/the-red-wolf-is-mostly-coyote-conservation-endangered

By conducting whole-genome sequence analysis on 28 canids—including gray wolves, red wolves, eastern wolves, coyotes, and even domestic dogs—the team found that the red wolf is about 25 percent gray wolf and 75 percent coyote, while the eastern wolf is about 50 to 75 percent gray wolf, and roughly one quarter coyote.

So although it is possible for them to go "extinct" it would also be possible to bring them back with some Wolf/Coyote breeding, you would just need to get the above ratio correct.