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WellBeing News

Abstract

While there may be as many as one billion domestic dogs in the world today, estimates of the global population of grey wolves (from whom domestic dogs evolved) put the number at a paltry 200,000-250,000. Once, there were an estimated 2 million wolves in North America alone, but the wolf has long been hated and persecuted by humans. From the 1600s to seventy years ago, those who wanted to eradicate wolves dominated wolf policy, and wolves were hunted out of most of Central Europe and the lower 48 states of the United States of America (USA), with only small relict populations left in northern Minnesota and Michigan. The 1950s through the 1980s were the low point for wolf populations in Europe. In 1984, in an article entitled “The big bad wolf?,” Stephen Mills reported less than 1,000 wolves in Western and Northern Europe. But, as attitudes to carnivores began to change, the number of people supporting wolves grew, leading to increased advocacy on their behalf.

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