From 1977 to 1980, Roy McBride combed pine and oak forests high in the Sierra Madre Occidental range of northern Mexico, searching for the last remaining wild Mexican gray wolves.
He had been there before, hunting wolves for ranchers, even patiently outwitting one of the most notorious wolves in local folklore. It had thwarted his traps for months, until finally falling prey to one he disguised in ashes and baited with a skunk hide.
But this time, McBride’s client wanted wolves alive.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to breed more endangered Mexican gray wolves in captivity to save them from extinction. Eradication campaigns had eliminated them from the wild in the United States, so the agency hired McBride to capture wolves across the border.
He caught three of the seven wolves in whose DNA the fate of the entire Mexican gray wolf subspecies would depend. But he was shocked when he saw some of the other founding wolves in the captive breeding program. They looked like dogs to him.
“The real reason that many of the … animals look like dogs is because that is what they are,” McBride later wrote in a 1997 letter to David Parsons, the agency’s Mexican Wolf Recovery Coordinator at the time. The recovery program’s opponents have argued that Mexican gray wolves already went extinct, accusing program managers of raising a wolf bloodline contaminated by dogs or coyotes.
But the University of Arizona study found no evidence that any of the founding wolves were wolf-dog hybrids or that dogs had recently hybridized with Mexican gray wolves.
“Our work is the largest genetic study, in sample size, of Mexican wolves to date,” the researchers wrote in their findings. They analyzed 87 Mexican gray wolves, comparing DNA samples to that of dogs and other gray wolves. It’s still an open question if wolves have interbred with coyotes and to what extent, but genetic work by the Fish and Wildlife Service suggests they have not, said Robert Fitak, one of the study’s authors.
He and the other researchers focused their attention on dogs over coyotes, he said, because it was a higher-priority question.
Their research could have dealt a blow to the recovery program if it had found wolf-dog hybridization...
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2 comments:
What's surprising about this? There is a long history of scientist's faking things to promote either themselves or their academic future starting with Peking Man. Take a look at how the archeologists, not having a good career path promoted the Antiquities Act and used it to feather their nests. When they pressured the federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and BLM, to follow the regulations in the act before doing ANY dirt disturbance work they really hit the employment golden goose. Every archeologist hired to do survey work was certain that another Rosetta Stone was under every cedar bush. Every arrowhead or broken piece of pottery was flagged, recorded, surveyed, and even put in small plastic tubes and reburied on the site for future reference. Collecting and burying was to prevent looting by arrowhead hunters out for some weekend enjoyment. Unfortunately no other Rosetta Stone find has occurred to date
and the archeologist continue to draw their check and the taxpayer continues to pay for their efforts.
Fakers are not limited to the dead. Remember the Aplomado Falcons which supposedly were "found" south of Alamogordo at Otero Mesa conviently perched above the biologists. Used Oats science!
Does anyone believe that the USFWS would admit that they have been propagating hybrid genetics since the late 1980'a. Bureaucrats in Federal Agencies lie to cover their tracks and thus justify their existence. The article was just more FAKE NEWS.
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