Rabies Threatening Rare Ethiopian Wolves
By ANTHONY MITCHELL
Associated Press Writer
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) – A rabies outbreak is threatening the few hundred remaining Ethiopian wolves – one of the world’s rarest animals, a wildlife expert said Friday.
At least 20 of the endangered wolves died in the last month in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains- a critical breeding ground for the reddish-brown animal, said Dr. Stuart Williams, a British conservationist.
The wolves are believed to have caught rabies from infected domestic dogs, said Williams, who heads the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Program in Addis Ababa.
Only about 500 Ethiopian wolves remain in the wild, with the majority in the Bale Mountains where the population was nearly wiped out by a 1991 rabies outbreak. It only has recovered within the last two years, Williams said.
“There are grave concerns that the current outbreak may become an epidemic that will spread and cause a similar significant crash in numbers,’ he said.
The solution is vaccinating those wolves that have not yet been infected, said Williams, who is awaiting permission from the Ethiopian government to go ahead with the inoculations.
Ethiopian officials were not immediately available for comment.
The wolves live in packs of up to 12 adults but hunt and forage alone, unlike gray wolves, their North American and European cousins.
Ethiopian wolves weigh about 50 pounds, about half as much as North American and European wolves, from which they are believed to have evolved during the last Ice Age, about 100,000 years ago.
Thousands of Ethiopian wolves once roamed much of the country’s mountainous north, but their numbers have fallen dramatically in recent decades as farmers encroached on their habitat and introduced domestic dogs that carried rabies.
The wolves also mate with the dogs, diluting a shrinking gene pool.