
SWELL Wolf Education Centre Coastal Wolves Project
Parks Canada – Wild about Wolves
One area of Vancouver Island that is providing good work in co-existing with coastal wolves is Parks Canada – Pacific Rim. They have developed a program called Wild about Wolves which they have been developing over the past 5 years.
One of the major components of their program is working with the FN groups that reside in the territory where the park is located. The FN people there have co-existed with the coastal wolves for hundreds of years.
There are two videos that Parks Canada has produced which demonstrates how the FN people have interacted with wolves. The first video is called: Traditional Knowledge & the link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTsSN3gc9G4
This video sets out how they view the wolf & how important this animal is to their culture.
The second video is titled: Traditional Worldviews on Wold Co-existence. In this video, three FN elders give us very good info on how to co-exist with the wolf & reduce wolf-human conflicts. Dennis Hetu of the Toquaht Nation gives us 4 simple rules to live by to harmoniously co-exist with wolves. The link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrNqtvkMWZw
If we view the wolf from the FN perspective of not inviting them into our world but respecting their world, co-existence is very achievable.
What species & sub-species are the Coastal Wolves?
There is some erroneous discussion & information that the coastal wolves are a separate subspecies. This is not true.
The coastal wolves are Grey Wolves (Canis lupus) and they (SE Alaska & BC Coastal Wolves) should be assigned to Canis lupus nubilus (Chambers 2012).
So they are not a separate sub-species but are what biologists term an Evolutionary Significant Unit (ESU) because of their unique ecological, morphological, behavioural, & genetic characteristics. (Munoz-Fuentes 2009).
So I am sure the discussion will continue but the coastal wolves despite being unique will remain under the nubilus subspecies.