2
" [Curtis Carley, first field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Program] decided early in the project that there was only one possible way of saving red wolves from genetic swamping by coyotes. Biologists were going to have to capture every red wolf remaining in the wild for placement in a captive breeding program. In effect, preserving the red wolf's purity required first bringing about its extinction in the wild and turning its former range over to coyotes and hybrids until biologists could produce enough "pure" animals, then finding a suitable protected preserve for releasing a captive-bred population into the wild again.
How difficult was that? After establishing a certified breeding program for red wolves at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, in 1974 and 1975, the Red Wolf Recovery team decided to examine as breeding candidates some fifty red wolves held in almost twenty zoos across the country. Using the morphology-howl criteria they had established, out of those fifty they identified but a single red wolf, a female in the Oklahoma City Zoo. They were convinced all the rest, plus their pups, were actually either coyotes or hybrids, and in the latter case the team insisted they be destroyed. When some of the shocked zoo personnel refused such a draconian order, in the name of purity Curtis Carley carried out the death sentences himself. "
― , Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History
9
" In our twenty-first century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia, and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Species cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis ... to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers ... in twentieth century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, ... "
― , Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History
