Post by Joanna on May 25, 2018 18:24:57 GMT -5
Mysterious Wolf-Like Creature Shot in Montana
A rancher in Denton, Montana, shot what he thought was a wolf, but when he summoned wildlife officials, he learned what he shot was something else entirely – what, no one could say. The dead animal’s canine teeth were too short, the front paws were tiny for a wolf and the claws were too long. And the ears were too big and the fur was wrong.
The creature was a young, non-lactating female and a canid, or member of the dog family, Montana wildlife officials concluded, but that’s about the experts could say “We have no idea what this is,” Bruce Auchly, information manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said. “And we won’t know until we get the DNA tests back.”
But from that vacuum of information has sprung not-quite-educated guesses from armchair taxonomists and conspiracy theorists: people who have spent entirely too much time staring at a picture of a carcass of a wolfish creature on the tailgate of a pickup truck. The leading theories are:
It’s Bigfoot: Because it’s large and hairy and unexplained.
It’s a dogman: Think Bigfoot with a snout. Or, as a website dedicated to dogman encounters defines them: “cryptozoological beings that are large and sometimes described as looking like upright canids.” According to the Great Falls Tribune, one reader commented: “They’re spotted each day and the government quells any and all reports. Several people report being strong armed into keeping quiet about their reports by men wearing black suits. These are just facts.” Apparently, some dogmen look like a stretched-out dog that walks on two feet. Others look like a Sasquatch with a Doberman’s face.
There has been only one reported dogman sighting in Montana, according to the dogman encounters website, which includes a handy map. “I sat up in my bed, frightened, but I didn’t feel the need to yell for my parents or anything,” the anonymous Montana poster continued. “It just kind of stared at me. While looking at it, I saw that it had pointed ears, with tufts of fur, like lynx have, and a muzzle like a German Shepard [sic].” After the dogman stepped over the poster’s fence, “I heard it yip and bark while on the other side,” he claimed, “which was prairie, with a butte and then forest. It was almost like it was calling to others.”
Some speculated it was a “dire wolf” and the creature got too close to livestock – not Prince Joffrey of “Game of Thrones” fame – and Winterfell an actual location, it’s nowhere near Denton, Montana. Dire wolves were native to the Americas and larger than their cousins, the gray wolf. But they became extinct more than 10,000 years ago. Thousands of dire wolf skeletons have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
Auchly doesn’t put much stock in this theory. “First off, ‘Dire Wolf’ was a wonderful song by the Grateful Dead in about 1971. I know I listened to it a lot,” he said. “In reality, a dire wolf is a prehistoric mammal from the age of mammoths and saber tooth tigers.”
But it could be a dire wolf 2.0. A breeder in southern Oregon has spent the past three decades attempting to create a new sort of dog called the American Alsatian that would look very much like the extinct species and the animals given to the children of House Stark. It’s a wolf-dog hybrid: Wolves and dogs are interfertile, according to the International Wolf Center, meaning they can interbreed and produce offspring that can then produce more offspring. “We’ve had a few instances of wolf/dog hybrids out there,” Ty Smucker, wolf management specialist for Montana FWP, told the Tribune. “One was out somewhere in eastern central Montana killing sheep like crazy. Finally, we caught it and it turned out to be a hybrid.”
Hybrids can be unpredictable. When wolves reach sexual maturity, hormonal changes can trigger behavior changes, making animals more stubborn or aggressive, the Wolf Center says. They’re more likely to challenge their owner even if that person picked up a wolf-looking puppy because he/she thought it looked cool. Abandonments are commonplace once people discover their animals may be difficult, or impossible, to control.
Wildlife officials, for some reason, are not relying on the armchair theories concerning the wolflike creature. The carcass was sent to the department’s lab in Bozeman, where researchers
will take tissue samples and ship them to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Laboratory in Oregon. Scientists will extract DNA from cells in search of specific DNA markers, which will be compared with those of known species.
“Social media was quick to pronounce the animal as everything from a wolf to a wolf hybrid to something mythical,” the wildlife agency’s news release read. “It may be awhile before anyone really knows what the animal near Denton really was.”
Source: Cleve R. Wootson Jr., The Washington Post, May 25, 2018.