North America has it’s first documented case of a healthy wolf killing a human in the wild.
A coroner’s jury in Saskatchewan has determined that Ontario university student Kenton Carnegie was killed in a wolf attack.
Carnegie was 22 when he died in November 2005 near Points North Landing, Sask. On a work term for a company at the mining exploration camp, located about 750 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon, Carnegie went for a walk and didn’t come back.
Searchers later found his body surrounded by wolves.
Not that the findings are undisputed. One expert witness, Paul Paquet, testified that it is more likely that it was a black bear that killed Carnegie. However, he did not rule out the possiblity that it was a wolf attack.
Mark McNay, recently retired as head of the research department at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (who happens to be my cousin, and with whom I visited in September when he flew through Whitehorse on his way south), testified that he was convinced that it was indeed a wolf attack. He argued that bears would have been in hibernation at the time Carnegie was killed, and that no bears had been seen in the area for several weeks before the attack, nor were any seen for months after.
In photographs of the site, what Paquet identified as bear tracks were actually wolf tracks, said McNay. The tracks were on the lake’s surface, which had not completely frozen over. When the wolf stepped into the ground and broke through to water, the water came up and made the track larger, leading people to believe it was bear tracks.
McNay said it was also unlikely that two wolves would have eaten the same hair from the dump on the same day Carnegie was killed.
As for the argument that wolves don’t attack humans, McNay said that is not the case anymore because wolves are becoming habitualized and losing their fear of people.
These incidents of wolves and people, predictably, are going to increase,” he said.
Sources: OHS Canada, CBC News
You’ll find more info on agressive and nonagressive wolf-human encounters in this case history (pdf) done for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game by Mark McNay.