mistermack wrote:What you say sounds reasonable, but it's possible you underestimate just how efficient the hunters and trappers of old actually were. The government ran a very effective campaign to eradicate the wolf, and paid a hefty bounty for each one killed.
I was quite surprised when I found this site : http://www.wolfweb.com/history2.html I didn't know just how determined they were to kill every wolf.
They managed to exterminate the wolf in most states, but they don't specifically mention Alaska. They obviously didn't succeed completely in Alaska, but they seem to have partly succeeded, as far as the Kenai Wolf is concerned.
When you say that they would have killed all the other wolves too, well, they tried to do just that, but didn't get them all.
So it's ordinary non ''alces'' wolves that have expanded back into Kenai.
You're confusing Alaska with other parts of the US where cattle and sheep ranchers live. Alaska is not "Most states", particularly wrt the wolf. Unlike other places, there's never been a concerted effort here to eliminate wolves.
That website says that it was poisoning with strychnine that was most efficient. I should imagine that that was true.
The book I mentioned, I must have read in the 1960s, and he was catagoric that the wolf was extinct in the Kenai peninsula at the time. I don't know if that was true.
Neither do I, since the Kenai wolf was only identified as a subspecies in 1944, and it was the late 60s before snowmachines (snowmobiles) became widespread.
I think it's a lot more likely that some visiting biologist wanted the notoriety before he scurried back to New York, or Miami, or wherever, when his funding ran out.
Anyway, I just looked online again, and wikipedia actually has a page on the Kenai subspecies, and they say that it's PROBABLY extinct, and blame organised hunting and poisoning. If you search for Kenai wolf, it doesn't come up, it's actually called the Kenai Peninsula Wolf : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenai_Peninsula_wolf
The dna of the current wolves is the same as for the rest of Alaska, so there is no detected relic of the original Peninsula wolf.
Whether they were genuinely extinct or not would be hard to prove, as you could never prove for sure that some didn't live on, but there were no reports of wolves until the recent repopulation. But the dna evidence says that they went extinct.
I just looked myself, and the fact is that there were very few adequate wildlife censuses done here before airplanes and snowmachines, for reasons I've touched on. Moreover, during the gold rushes, there was Seward, and there was Hope. In 1900, there were 21 people in Cooper Landing. There was no Soldotna or Homer, and Kenai was a trading post called Ft St. Nichols that served a total population of less than 1000 Dena'ina. Call it a human population of maybe 2000, who supposedly spent their winters ranging far and wide packing strychnine in single-minded pursuit of wolves. And who, BTW, were so effective they nearly wiped them out in 20 years?
Foot travel through the Kenai Peninsula is pretty limited. There was the Iditarod Trail, and the Indian fish camp trail along parts of the Kenai River. Walking through the woods here in straight lines is simply not an option. There was probably the occasional Swede or Norwegian who carved himself some tele skis. There were some dogsleds. There were snowshoes. Leave a trail, and it's absolutely brutal around here.
I'm just having a tough time buying into the official narrative. I think it was likely concocted from a barstool by some decidedly unFarley Mowat-like researchers.
