Keeping captive populations down

[pawnee]

I`ve heard that some keepers of captive wolves feed birth control to their female alpha wolf so that she cannot have puppies in order to keep the captive wolf population down. Do a lot of keepers do this? I`ve also heard that many zoos spay their alpha females for this reason and as a means to help control aggression in captive packs.

[wolf567]

I don't know that is a good question though, i dont think that the two zoos near me that i go to at least once a year use any of them mehods.

[WQ Project Coordinator]

Here at the Minnesota Zoo, the Mexican Gray Wolves have implants to prevent breeding. Currently, all the Mexican Gray Wolves here are males, but recently we were housing some females. The females also had implants to prevent them from going into heat. There are many reasons to control reproduction in captive animals. For the Mexican gray wolves, they are managed by an SSP (Species Survival Plan) to ensure that genetic diversity is maintained. Also it can reduce social tensions that can occur when males fight over females. If the captive population is related, you probably wouldn't want them to breed. These are just a couple of the reasons why captive animals are prevented from breeding.

[pawnee]

I don`t disagree with caping off captive animal populations, but I never knew that there were birth control pills for canines. This could solve a LOT of problems with other animal types if it worked well with captive wolves. e.g, stray dog populations.

[wolf567]

Thinking about it now i think my local zoos use implats, i think, i know with the tirgers they just dont put females and males togeater unless they want them to bred, i do not know about the wolves.

[CLBaileyi]

Because gray wolves breed very easily in captivity, most zoos do control breeding in one way or another. We tried to use an implant called "Deslorelin" to prevent breeding and maintain a larger group in a larger enclosure for our Mexican gray wolves. For a variety of reasons though, it didn't work.

Some of the other ways of controlling breeding have been mentioned. Most zoos that have gray wolves only have a single sex group of wolves for that reason. Also, some will spay or neuter one sex or the other to prevent breeding or to minimize aggression (we had done that with our plains wolves).

Many of the other implants or "pills" can have alot of negative side effects, so they are not used for long periods of time, or are not used at all anymore. This is an important problem for most zoos to try and solve.