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Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com
Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com

Spreading fires terrorize and kill Colorado wildlife

Spreading fires terrorize and kill Colorado wildlife

Newborns vulnerable; rescue center packs up its wolves to flee flames


By Stephen Kiehl
Sun National Staff
Originally published June 16, 2002

FLORISSANT, Colo. – Stressed over a rapid evacuation to escape a raging
wildfire, the 14-month-old timber wolf-mix Shunka was shaking so violently
the other night that her keeper took a sheet into Shunka’s stall and lay
down on the hay beside her. Darlene Kobobel was able to calm Shunka, but
she is worried about her wolves. Tuesday, she moved all 12 of them from
her Wolf Rescue Center to a small barn in this town 30 miles west of
Colorado Springs.

“When you see orange flames at night and you’re one ridge away and the
wind is blowing in your direction, it’s time to go,” Kobobel said
yesterday, explaining why she left her 8 1/2 -acre center in Lake George,
a town on the front lines of the Hayman fire.

The fire has engulfed 102,000 acres in central Colorado in the past week
and forced 5,400 people from their homes. It was 30 percent contained
yesterday. No one has been killed or seriously injured, but the toll in
wildlife is far higher, officials say.

The fire is centered in Pike National Forest, home to elk, deer, coyote
and mountain lions. Spring is the birthing season for these animals, along
with birds of prey. While the species are not in long-term danger, many
individual animals are.

“Around the perimeter of the fire, the only thing they’ve found is
carcasses,” said Linda Cope, president of the Wild Forever Foundation in
Colorado Springs. “We’re going to lose quite a few of the babies of the
deer and the elk. They’re just being born and they can barely walk.”

Some of the adults, she said, have escaped to towns just beyond the fire,
where they have encountered people and traffic they’re not used to. Just
yesterday, a friend of Kobobel’s pulled up to her barn in a pickup truck,
with the bloodied carcass of an elk that had been hit. She wrapped the
elk’s haunches in plastic bags and put them in a freezer.

“Thank you for that,” Kobobel told her friend. “They’ll totally enjoy it,”
she said of her animals.

Kobobel, 40, founded the Wolf Rescue Center a decade ago when she was
volunteering at an animal shelter near here. The shelter had a wolf-dog
hybrid it was going to destroy that it could not place for adoption.

The animal’s name was Chinook, and it was a beautiful white malamute-wolf
mix with gray and black markings. Kobobel took it in and immediately began
her quest to save these hybrid animals that cannot survive in the wild but
are too wild for people’s homes.

“I put an ad in the paper, and in the first week I ended up with 17
animals,” she said. Most of them were more dog than wolf, so she was able
to find homes for them. Thirteen states, including Maryland, ban people
from owning wolf-dog hybrids at all.

“When an animal has wolf blood, they’re going to have predatory
instincts,” said Kobobel, sitting in the barn, surrounded by dozens of
bales of hay and bags of high-quality dog food. “They will kill cats. They
won’t get along with other dogs. They will tear up homes.”

People get wolf-dog hybrids because they think the wolf is majestic or
spiritual, she said. “But the new wears off fast when they don’t chase a
ball or ride in the back of a pickup truck.”

The howling at sunrise doesn’t help, either.

Wolves are most often bred with German shepherds, huskies and malamutes,
said Kobobel, who travels to schools and state parks to provide wolf
education programs. “People think it’s a neat thing to have a wolf as a
pet,” she said. “It’s cruel.”

Kobobel separates her wolves into packs of two – otherwise the alpha males
would kill each other. Yesterday, each pack was confined to a
15-by-15-foot stall in a horse barn on Black Bear Ranch.

They are not used to such a small space. Most were sleeping from the
stress of the move. One kept backing itself into a corner. Another was
shaking, its eyes wide with fear.

Kobobel had planned to move the wolves here in August, after she and her
volunteers had time to set up 3/4 -acre pens for each pack. She signed the
lease just this month. But the fire forced her to move before she was
ready.

She moved 10 wolves Tuesday, loading them into horse trailers for the
6-mile trip from Lake George to the ranch. The other two wolves had to be
sedated, and one slept for two days.

From the ranch yesterday, 9,000 feet above sea level, Kobobel kept a wary
eye on the sky. The scent of smoke was light on the air. She does not want
to move her wolves again. She’s not sure they would survive.

“Wolves can have a heart attack from stress,” she said. “I can’t move
again.”

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