How Do You Make a Wild Animal?

[duskypack]

This is a fascinating article, thanks for sharing! I knew of the efforts to preserve wildness but had never knew just how much effort they put into releasing wolves.

[Koa]

In order to minimize the human stain, SSP wolves are fed whole carcass deer, donated by hunters and the Department of Transportation or collected directly from the road; they’re also free to hunt anything that strays into their enclosures––raccoons, skunks, ducks. And though staff members do a daily sight check, most observation comes through those handy webcams; the wolves rarely see the staff and remain unmolested by human hands. “Under that coat they could be skin and bones and we might not be able to tell,” Howell explained. The one exception to the rule is an annual health check, and this contact is balanced out by being deliberately unsettling, with capture boxes and muzzles. “It’s good because it reminds them that we’re scary,” Howell said––humans should be seen as something to be avoided. A wolf will need to show it understands this if it is to graduate to a cargo hold, a pre-release facility, and ultimately freedom in the wilderness.

I have always wondered how animals are "handled" (for lack of a better word) if there is an effort to release them into the wild. Good to know.

Howell acknowledges the inherent paradox in controlling the lives of animals in order to make them “self-willed” (the original meaning of wild).

(Unrelated to the content of the article itself, but I didn't know that-- cool.)

Thanks for sharing.

[Sambhur]

This was super interesting, thanks for posting it! I especially liked reading the bits Koa quoted - I learned something new. Many mammals don't quite make it in the wild when they're released (especially big cats, as I've been reading), so it's good to really see what they're doing to combat that.