Senator Targets Struggling Red Wolf Population [View all]

North Carolina’s junior senator, Thom Tillis, wants the state’s endangered red wolves to be declared extinct—again.

Tillis, a Republican, was behind a single paragraph in a 148-page spending bill of the Senate Appropriations Committee that could doom the species.

“There is a less than respectful history of dialogue between folks in North Carolina and the Fish & Wildlife Service,” Tillis said in 2016.

Red wolves were once found across the eastern United States, but by the 1970s they were only found in parts of southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. Red wolves were one of the first animals listed under the Endangered Species Act. They were declared extinct in the wild in 1980 but reintroduced in North Carolina after a breeding program in zoos.

The animals, which weigh 45 to 80 pounds as adults, are notoriously shy. They eat deer, rats, rabbits and other animals. Red wolves are in five northeastern North Carolina counties, but their numbers have dropped to less than 45 in the wild from about 130 in the mid-2000s.

https://www.dcreport.org/2017/12/01/senator-targets-struggling-red-wolf-population/