Originally appeared on the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine website and Oath magazine.
The College of Veterinary Medicine is at the center of a nationwide effort to help the canid survive, providing medical care, conducting research and tending its own pack of the critically endangered species.
By Burgetta Eplin Wheeler
A kennel taking up much of the small exam room at the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine holds the patient as technicians, anesthetists, doctors and students crowd around, some sitting on the floor, waiting for the red wolf to wake.
The injured animal, one of fewer than 20 of the world’s most critically endangered canid species living in the wild, has just had X-rays on his hind legs to determine what damage a run-in with a trap might have done. The ankle isn’t broken, but it’s unstable, so surgery to insert a plate is scheduled for the next morning.
The exotic animal medical team will be ready. NC State, less than three hours away from the five coastal North Carolina counties where the last wild red wolves live, is always ready to support red wolf recovery.
Along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan, the College of Veterinary Medicine is integral to the nationwide effort to preserve and repopulate the species, which in 1980 was declared extinct in the wild.
But not in human care. In the 1970s, the wildlife service gathered 14 of the remaining animals and started a breeding and release program, which has led to the wild population in North Carolina. Currently, about 230 wolves are spread among 49 U.S. zoos and facilities as part of the program.
In North Carolina, the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, the Rowan Wild near Salisbury, the Western North Carolina Nature Center near Asheville and the Museum of Life and Science in Durham house and care for red wolves.
So does the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine in Raleigh.
Four red wolves currently populate the Wolfpack wolfpack. The patient, a released wolf whose orange tracking collar alerted the wildlife service to his distress, makes five.
