Farmer kills wolf in Shelburne; Wolf had eaten sheep; wildlife officials believe it most likely was domesticated

[ Originally published on: Saturday, October 20, 2007 ]

SHELBURNE -- A wolf that killed at least a dozen lambs and sheep in western Franklin County was slain by a farmer on Sunday, and the animal's rare presence locally is now being investigated by state authorities.

According to the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, the animal most likely escaped, or was illegally released, from someone who was keeping it unlawfully.

Wildlife officials first became aware of the animal on Oct. 13 when it killed and partially consumed 10 to 15 lambs at a farm in Shelburne. In retrospect, they believe that it is likely the same beast that slaughtered sheep at another farm a month earlier.

According to the wildlife department, a state biologist who went out to look into the attack on Oct. 13 measured the predator's tracks and informed the farmer that it was a large canid and that he was allowed to shoot a predator that attacked or destroyed his livestock.

At first, because the sheep had been slaughtered indiscriminately and only partially eaten, biologists assumed that the predation was being carried out by a large dog.

On Oct. 14, the state biologist was called back to the farm to look at the large predator that had been killed. The carcass was taken to UMass to be examined.

Professor Todd Fuller of the University of Massachusetts Amherst said Friday that when he looked at the animal, it seemed to be consistent with the North American gray wolf.

'It looks like wolves that I have worked with in other places,' he said.

Young male

The animal was a young male weighing 85 pounds that was found to have stomach contents that included bone fragments and teeth from a lamb and tufts of wool.

According to Fuller, there are no wolf packs closer to Massachusetts than Quebec, Canada.

'It is not impossible for a gray wolf to end up down here, but it does not seem likely,' he said.

Professor Tom French, MassWildlife assistant director of natural heritage and endangered species, agrees with Fuller and thinks that it is most likely that the animal escaped from captivity.

'The way it attacked the sheep is not typical behavior of a wild wolf,' he said.

According to French, the wolf seems to have attacked sheep on two farms in the Shelburne area, one in September and one earlier this month, but ate only small portions of the animals that he killed. The farms that were hit were only three-quarters of a mile apart, he said, but he would not name the farms.

'It is behavior that is more typical of a domestic dog that is being fed at home and is hunting for sport. We deal with this a lot with hybrids,' he said.

Springdelle Farm

The wildlife director said that the first Shelburne farm that was hit lost four adult rams on Sept. 10. The Recorder has been able to determine that the first group of sheep attacked were on Springdelle Farm.

Barbara Parry of Springdelle Farm in Shelburne wrote in her Internet blog in September that she had been working at her barn when she received a frantic call to return to the paddock where she found that only three of her seven rams were present and they were clearly under stress.

'After shutting them into their shed, we began searching the pasture for the missing (animals).

'Steady rain and a heavy mist prevented us from seeing very far. At the pasture's edge we made the grim discovery that two of our (rams) had been savagely attacked and killed during the night,' she wrote.

During a continued search, Parry and her partner found another sheep not far from the first kill site and the final sheep was discovered later by a state wildlife agent dead in the woods downhill from their house.

According to Parry, one of the rams, named Trumpet, weighed 250 pounds and the other sheep weighed around 225 pounds.

'Since then, we have beefed up security for the rest of the flock,' she wrote.

The second farm suffered nine lambs killed outright, two more wounded but alive and four more missing and not recovered.

'They were very small lambs, 15- to 20-pound Dorsets, so they would have been easy to kill.

According to Fuller, although it is unlikely that the Shelburne wolf was part of a wild population, it is certainly possible given that 10 to 15 percent of wild wolves will wander off on their own in an attempt to establish new territory and start a new pack.

The professor notes that wolves from Wisconsin have been found as far south as Missouri and Arkansas, which would be at least as great a distance as from Massachusetts to Quebec.

'If it turns out that this is a wolf from Canada that made it all the way down here, I would not be surprised,' he said.

The wildlife service says that, several times in the last few years, wolves from Quebec have been found in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, so it is possible that wolf packs may be seen in the next few decades in the Northeastern United States.

'There have been some other re-populations that we did not expect, such as moose. If someone had told you 30 years ago that we would have as large a moose population in Massachusetts as we do now, you would have told them they were crazy,' he said.

Pet wolves?

French said that another wolf, mistaken by a hunter for a coyote, was shot, on Oct. 1, 2006, in Vermont, but was found to have been bred in captivity.

According to French, people want to keep wolves around for a wide variety of reasons.

'Some people love to have captive wolves because it gives them a sense of being close to nature and an icon of nature. They have this mystical feeling about it.

'Other people just want the meanest junkyard dog they can find and they leave the animal chained up in the back yard without any opportunity for socialization, which is damaging to wolves because they are very social animals,' he said.

The Shelburne wolf carcass is being sent to the federal laboratory in Ashland, Ore., for DNA testing to determine whether it is a hybrid, or a full-blooded wolf, and where it came from.

'We are leaning toward a captive source.' French said.

According to MassWildlife, it is illegal to hold wolves or wolf/dog hybrids in captivity in Massachusetts and most of the information that they get about such illegally held animals come from neighbors of the people holding them.

Anyone who may have information about where the Shelburne wolf came from should contact MassWildlife or the Environmental Police at 1-800-632-8075.

 

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