Taigan chases wolf at festival

The event was near the village of Bokonbayevo, some 186 miles east of the capital Bishkek, August 24, 2007. More then 20 hunters with dogs and eagles took part. The slideshow illustrates exhibitions of hunting with Taigans and Golden Eagles using domesticated wolves as the quarry. The Salburun (hunting) festival has been held annually since 1997.

Hat tip to Dr. Milton Ong.

AP:

THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn.-
Mike Olson had been working under his dad’s deck for about 20 minutes when he realized he wasn’t alone. “I cocked my head back, and I saw those two eyes looking at me,” Olson said of the Monday encounter. “I got out real fast.”

Olson had seen what he thought was a gray wolf (Canis lupus -JDZ). “It was probably 6 feet away,” he said. “It was just laying down. It had its head up and was just looking at me.”

Olson and his dad, Erling, called the police, who responded expecting to find a large, wolf-like dog beneath the deck.

“They put their head under the deck, and sure enough, it was a wolf,” said Craig Mattson, deputy chief for the Thief River Falls Police Department.

Police and the city’s animal control officer were unable to put a noose around the wolf’s neck and capture it alive, Mattson said. He said the animal had been growling and appeared to have mange, a parasitic infestation of the skin. So, a section of planking was removed and an officer shot the 104-pound male wolf, Mattson said.

It’s the first time Mattson can remember a wolf in town.

As for Olson, he cautiously went back to work on the deck Tuesday.

“I’m going to look twice,” he said.

Darren Naish reviews evidence suggesting that the conventional view that domestic dogs descend from a number of independently-domesticated wolf populations is wrong. Recent studies suggest that domestic dogs more probably descend from an ancestral form much closer to pariah dogs, the semi-domesticated and feral dogs of the Old World tropics.

And Steve Bodio agrees.

Very interesting. Thanks, Steve.