Highland Wildlife Park kills entire pack

According to a BBC news article "..The [Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (owners of the park)] said that in the past five years the six wolves stopped 'portraying their natural behaviour', or pack dynamic, which it said was essential to the survival of the species.."

So, what is to stop their shiny new Scandinavians eventually stopping producing their natural behaviour too ?

If they don't know how to fix social problems within a captive wolf pack without wiping it out then they are going to run into exactly the same problem again a few years from now. The truth is that they did not and do not have the skills and knowledge available to understand the problem or implement a practical solution. I doubt if any serious attempts were made to analyse and solve the problem as none of the leading, PRACTICAL wolf behaviourists in this country or any other seem to have been contacted. Speculation in the light of previous experience would indicate that a fleeting consultation with an academic animal behaviour theorist may have taken place but not much more. (I don't see why I should be fair about this topic at all but let's be fair anyway and say that I don't know the facts here.)

The breakdown of the social fabric of a wolf pack is all too easy in a captivity. Having too many animals of the same age and sex intensifies instability by making rank difficult to establish whilst bull-in-a-china-shop culls traumatise entire packs and destroy their' territorial confidence. On top of this, captivity modifies behaviour anyway and confinement intensifies it. Bungled pack management leads to situations where behaviour is heavily influenced - inhibited or exaggerated - by anxiety and competition whilst inept and destructive social interactions occur at a frequency high enough to promote even more competition, bullying, resentment, frustration and learned helplessness.

Unless the animals concerned were highly inbred to the point of being incapable of producing the normal gamut of canine behaviour then the situation was probably remediable even without recourse to the importing of new blood. If inbreeding was the problem then importing new blood with a program to integrate the newcomers would have been part of the solution. In managing large captive wolf packs, it is a sad fact that culling of individuals does occasionally become completely unavoidable (See the Dutcher's books and films) and in extremis, this option always offers a way out of the problem without wiping out the whole pack.

It is unlikely that much of a serious attempt was made to solve the problem though because zoos currently earn industry brownie points for stocking the latest, trendy endangered European species and the old pack were American and not particularly endangered. There is substantial incentive in the zoo industry to dispose of non-favoured species and replace them with the ones favoured by zoological academia. Due to the increasing pressure of public opinion and ever-tightening legislation, the survival of zoos in Britain depends now largely upon presenting themselves as the practical arm of academic conservation interests rather than the simple, public attractions that they actually are. The truth is that those wolves which died were actually condemned by those who have tightened the law in ways which do not actually protect zoo animals any further at all but simply cause the zoos to close ranks, stop talking to practical animal experts and climb into bed with academia where their animals' lives are now subject to the whim of people who care only about theories, careers and "populations"

Even if the pack really was wiped out for "conservation" reasons rather than zoo-industry politics, the decision to do so was misguided at the very least. Conservation is about concern for populations not individuals but captivity is about concern for animal welfare in addition to anything else it may be about. Killing an entire pack of captive wolves for reasons imported from another intellectual arena - conservation - is inexcusable. Captive animals are not a wild population, they are captive individuals and dependent upon their captors for their welfare.

One also has to ask why the news of this cull took so long to come out - I believe it was four months. If the pack really was fatally diseased, making a cull on medical grounds justified and/or they had testimony from the acknowledged top PRACTICAL wolf behaviour experts that the situation was not recoverable then why not just go public with it ? They would get flack from the animal rights people whichever way they turned but at least most of the public would have sympathised with a cull brought about by proven humane necessity.