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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   26362 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Anyone remember Red Wolves?

Pepperidge Farm remembers! Critically endangered, then died out, then reappeared because it's just what happens when a wolf fucks a coyote.

I was terrified as a kid when Ranger Rick magazine lead me to believe that their impending extinction would extend to all life on earth via the acid rain!

I just did a bunch of red wolf googling and the mainstream position is that red wolves are a separate species and not gray or eastern wolves mixed with coyotes. For one thing, red wolves predate gray wolves in North America.

Red wolves are part coyote and coyotes are part red wolf. There's some amount of mixing between them.

Much of my own skepticism about the evironmental movement comes from a childhood spent reading Ranger Rick, and a good enough memory to remember the predictions it made.

The Boy Who Cried (Endangered Species of) Wolf?

Is it a consensual situation between a wolf and a coyote bitch, or is it a stronger predator forcing himself on a weaker one?

Both wolves and coyotes raise their pups with high-paternal-investment models, so it seems unlikely the odd rape baby would result in a breeding population.

Uh, are you talking about the wrong animal? Red wolves were critically endangered, captured from the last remaining population in Louisiana, and then released in North Carolina after a captive breeding program. They're still critically endangered today. Whether this is a problem or not is a different matter, but the conventional story is basically accurate.

Coywolves are a different thing.

No, I'm not. And no, they're not.

The red wolf's taxonomic classification as being a separate species has been contentious for nearly a century, being classified either as a subspecies of the gray wolf Canis lupus rufus,[9][10] or a coywolf (a genetic admixture of wolf and coyote)

Uh, red wolves are definitely a coherent group in the wild.

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