Photo of the Day #468: Red wolf

Tracy,

Not dogified, they accepted their adoption. We'll adopt most anything as a surrogate child. Some animals don't even know they've been adopted. Other animals prefer their independence. But some take to adoption like a pre-teen girl to a soppy romance.

Those two red wolves decided that humans are neat critters it's fun to be with. It's how we came to domesticate the dog, the cat, and the horse. It's how we'll come to domesticate the southern white rhino, the barn owl, and the tasmanian devil. For those three species tend to bond with humans much as those two specimens of C.l.rufus have.

Remember what Charles Darwin taught us, we are part of the natural world, and what we do is natural. When non-human animals react to us they are doing what they would do to any animal in a similar situation.

Wolves are beautiful animals. I happen to like any mammal related to the dog. I like this photo a lot.

ARE there any genetically pure red wolves left? I was under the impression that pretty much the entire remaining red wolf population had hybridised with coyotes and occasional domestic dogs, due to scarcity in their own wild population and increasing populations of the other canids.