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Carnivorous and Omnivores Animals, Excluding Felids
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Canids (Canidae) & Hyaenids (Hyaenidae)
Wolf (Canis lupus)
Wolf (Canis lupus)
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Wolf (Canis lupus)
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   *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author
  *This image is copyright of its original author Riddhi Mukherjee-The Wolf of the Mangrove Delta! ~ A sighting that created a small storm across Indian media , researchers , photographers & wannabe cartoonists  *This image is copyright of its original author :) The Indian wolf is generally found in dry deciduous forests and grassland habitats, so when this record sighting happened in the mangrove habitat,it was a phenomenal record.All prominent Indian publishing & media houses covered it along with interviews of yours truly!Sundarban National Park , April 2017. Nikon D810, Nikkor 600mm f4 E FL VR. — atSundarbans National Park.    (01-08-2019, 06:57 PM)Pckts Wrote: I had no idea that they lived in the Sunderban. They don't... Nobody knows where this one came from & it haven't been sighted since. There is sparse wolf-presence in the western areas of Bengal, adjoining the Deccan plateau. But everybody is clueless about how one ended up in Sundarbans, which is separated from easternmost known wolf habitats of India by a 3.5km wide river!
Vikram Ghanekar
Although I failed to spot a snow leopard on my recent trip to Ladakh, rest of the wildlife, stunning landscapes and warm hospitality of staff at Snow Leopard Lodge more than made it up. Here a pair of Tibetan wolves("Shanku" )cross a snow covered mountainside in Ulley, Ladakh. Temperatures were always below freezing hitting -18C at night, with a day time high of -5 C. This along with an altitude of 14000 ft or more than 4000 metres made taking every little step a big effort. Tracking these wolves, especially uphill, left me breathless but the sighting of these rare creatures was absolutely worth the effort.  *This image is copyright of its original author
@Sanju here at around 4:37 min Himalayan wolf eating a Kiang and 5:00 minutes Wolf and wild yak interaction
(01-25-2019, 08:26 PM)Jimmy Wrote: @Sanju here at around 4:37 min Himalayan wolf eating a Kiang and 5:00 minutes Wolf and wild yak interaction wow, Tibetan wolf eating biggest wild ass on earth (I doubt that lone wolf hunted on its own or it is dead already)!!! and predation on yak's calf  very nice video and great find @Jimmy (video took a while to play though  )
If this male is an Indian wolf its the most impressive specimen I've seen. Normally they look like rodent hunters.
 *This image is copyright of its original author
(01-26-2019, 06:21 AM)Wolverine Wrote: If this male is an Indian wolf its the most impressive specimen I've seen. Normally they look like rodent hunters.  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author @Wolverine What about him man?  #18
Can Japan’s “Lost Wolves” be Reintroduced?
January 28, 2019 By: Gregory McCann  *This image is copyright of its original author It has been at least a century since the last Japanese wolf called out into the night. Indeed, for Japan, with its mega-cities, human-carved landscapes and even cemented riverbeds, it might seem ridiculous to think that wolves—two species, in fact—once roamed this fascinating but thoroughly modern and human-dominated landscape.
Surely, this is the land of Pikachu and the monsters depicted in Japanese Anime, not a place where actual apex predators take down deer and the occasional human passerby? One could be forgiven for believing so, but an organization called the Japanese Wolf Alliance (JWA) aims to bring them back, most likely through importing closely-related Russian wolves, in part because the sika deer population in Hokkaido island alone has reached over a half a million and is devastating the natural balance of the ecosystem. Not even the mighty resident brown bears can do anything about the exploding sika population, which is causing tens of millions of dollars in damage to agriculture and the environment. The wolves have to come back to restore the balance.
Brett L. Walker, author of the highly readable The Lost Wolves of Japan, explains what happened to Japan’s wolves and why they were exterminated (when they were once worshipped) in a campaign of eradication: “Even though Japanese worshiped wolves, they also killed them, particularly after the spread of rabies in the 18th century. In a bizarre episode unique to global wolf history, in the 18th century wolves became rabid man-killers in many parts of Japan, and wolf hunts, designed to cleanse the landscape of what many Japanese saw as demons, often looked more like ceremonies than hunts…..Even as wolves killed and ate Japanese travelers in the 18th century, most Japanese still viewed wolves as deities who lived in an otherworldly space of mountains and forests, and for this reason they ceremoniously killed these demons or offered prayers to competing deities, such as the “pasture deity” (makigami), hoping to protect livestock from wolf predation.” And for human safety, one would imagine.
This is a far cry from the Japan of today, with its bullet trains and cosplay and internet-addicted hikikomori, or people who deliberately shut themselves away from society, but wolves once ranged from northernmost Hokkaido Island all the way down to Kyushu Island—the southernmost of the “big four” Japanese islands.
The ecological benefits to the reintroduction of wolves to America’s Yellowstone National Park have been well-documented, but where exactly would new wolves for Japan come from? According to Dan Zukowski, they would be captured from the wild in northeast Asia, where their numbers are already low: “A separate species, the Honshu wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax), survived until 1905. A recent DNA study published in Science found that it was more closely related to an ancient species that lived in Siberia until about 20,000 years ago than to modern grey wolves. Nambu has suggested that wolves from Mongolia (above) or China would be the most appropriate candidate to bring to Japan forests. Neither are abundant. The most recent estimate of 10,000 wolves in Mongolia dates to 2004 and showed a sharp decline from 30,000 in 1980. Wolf pelts, teeth, skulls, and paws are readily found in Chinese shops along the Mongolian border, according to a 2009 European Commission report.”
Photo by @togethertheytravel The now near-extinct and/or completely assimilated Ainu indigenous people of Japan got along fine with wolves, but can modern Japanese do the same? It is one thing to have monkeys soaking in hot springs for tourists to photograph, but quite another for humans to live among large predators. Yet the idea of reintroducing wolves to Japan remains enticing, and in fact this highly industrialized nation boasts an impressive array of wildlife, including the Iriomote Cat (listed by the IUCN as Critically Endangered) on Iriomote island in the Ryukyu archipelago between Kyushu and Taiwan, the now high-threatened dugong of Okinawa (threatened due to US military projects in the area), sea turtles, and a special form of red coral much sought after by the Chinese (which brings on Chinese poaching vessels), among many other forms of wildlife.
Of course, Japan also recently decided to resume commercial whaling, the country smuggles in large quantities of wild-caught otters from other countries for the domestic pet trade, and the mass slaughter of dolphins in “The Cove” of Taiji in northeastern Japan is nothing short of horrific. And yet, the fact that there is a movement on to bring wolves back from extinction (albeit another sub-species from Mainland Asia) is proof that there is a fairly substantial number of Japanese who care deeply about their nation’s rich natural heritage—enough so to live with man-eating predators, once again.
If the wolves do come back (are imported) the plan would likely be hatched in Shiretoko National Park in Hokkaido, where huge brown bears already roam, where spotted seals relax on floating ice blocks, and where sika deer run rampant. But who knows, if the reintroduction program moves forward and is successful, could wolves once howl in the night in the parallel universe of Japan’s majestic mountains that ring its dazzling cities? Time will tell, and this author sure hopes so.https://www.asiasentinel.com/society/jap...3No7rlOXtQ  |
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