Food handouts doom wolf
SAFETY: Animal shot after it confronted hitchhikers.
By Craig Medred
Anchorage Daily News
Once the free and easy food appeared, the Cantwell wolf was doomed; there
was no going back to struggling to kill moose or caribou.
Nobody knows how the feeding got started, State Fish and Wildlife
Protection trooper Greg Garcia said Wednesday, but the young black male
was quickly addicted.
By the time Garcia was called, the animal was already beginning to think
of people as its food suppliers.
“It let me pull right up to it in a pullout,” Garcia said. ‘I videotaped
it. I photographed it.”
The wolf, he added, appeared to be eating dog food dumped along the George
Parks Highway. Garcia tried to scare it off. It wouldn’t go.
“You could startle it,” he said, “but it would come right back.”
Over the days and weeks that followed, Garcia got periodic reports about
the animal. It hung around a business south of Cantwell. It showed up
often along the highway.
“I had a few calls on it as a traffic hazard, people feeding it,” he said.
‘But every time I got there, it was gone.”
“This wolf was being hand fed by a lot of uninformed people over the
course of several weeks,” the mid-July “Bear Activity Update” from nearby
Denali National Park and Preserve reported. “Some people were giving it
Milkbones, and others were trying to get it to pose for pictures in the
back of their pickup truck.
“It is a very sad scene to imagine. It also sounds like the word got out
in Anchorage about a great place to go see a wolf, and that probably sent
even more people to gawk at the animal.”
All told, Garcia said, this “was ongoing for three or four weeks.”
He kept hoping the wolf would go back to nature. Wildlife experts warned
that was unlikely and predicted the next chapter in the story was likely
to involve the wolf behaving aggressively in an effort to frighten food
offerings out of people.
That confrontation finally came with a pair of hitchhikers along the
highway, Garcia said. The wolf stalked them. It refused to be chased away. They
didn’t know what to think.
‘I guess they were terrified,” Garcia said. The trooper called wolf
experts at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to consult.
“I asked them what their thoughts were,” he said.
They predicted one of three things was likely to happen:
One, the wolf would get hit by a car on the busy highway.
Two, the animal would survive until the Aug. 10 opening of the wolf
hunting season and be immediately shot.
The third potential outcome, Garcia said, was somebody could get bit.
“There was a public safety issue there,” he said.
Several wolf attacks on humans have been documented in recent years,
including one at Icy Bay north of Yakutat. Garcia had been working in Hoonah,
southeast of Yakutat, when that happened. He helped make the decision that, given
the options with the Cantwell animal, the wisest thing to do was kill the
wolf sooner rather than later.
Zoos have all the wolves they need, he said, and biologists concluded that
trying to dart, capture and transplant this one would be a waste of time.
It was so habituated it would immediately go looking for human food no
matter where it was left.
So the order went out to kill the wolf.
When a trooper patroling the highway a couple weeks ago eased into a
pull-off and found the animal there looking for handouts, he shot it.
“It’s in my freezer now awaiting a necropsy,” Garcia said Wednesday.
“Basically, I guess the message here is don’t feed wild animals.”
Unfortunately, he added, that is a message that’s sometimes difficult to
get across.
“It’s just, I guess, the nature of people,” he said.
“There are a lot of people,” the Denali report noted, “who think
habituating wildlife to our presence is good, and it helps visitors
experience and appreciate the animals better, but it is not hard to see
how selfish and potentially dangerous that behavior can be. . . . Use this
story to help educate the many visitors you may encounter during the day.
Many of these people just simply don’t know any better.
“This tragic story is a good example of why we try so hard to keep
wildlife wild.”