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Hokkaidō wolf

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Also known as Hokkaido Wolf, Canis lupus hattai, Ezo Wolf

extinct subspecies of mammal

~10 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The Hokkaido wolf (Canis lupus hattai), also known as the Ezo wolf (Japanese: エゾオオカミ(蝦夷狼)ー, Hepburn: Ezo Ōkami) and in Russia as the Sakhalin wolf, is an extinct subspecies of the gray wolf that once inhabited coastal northeast Asia. It was one of two subspecies that were once found in the Japanese archipelago, the other being the Japanese wolf (C. l. hodophilax). Its closest relatives were the wolves of North America rather than those in Asia.

It was exterminated in Hokkaido during the Meiji Restoration period, when American-style agricultural reforms incorporated the use of strychnine-laced baits to kill livestock predators. Some taxonomists believe that it survived up until 1945 on the island of Sakhalin.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Hokkaidō wolf” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.