Жоқ болған Хоккайдо қасқасы (Жоқ болған Эзо қасқасы)

Extinct subspecies of the gray wolf

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

The Ezō wolf is an extinct subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus). In 1890, the skulls of Japanese wolves (Canis lupus hodophilax) were compared with those of wolves from Hokkaido in the British Museum. The specimens were noticeably different and explained to be local varieties of the same subspecies. Later, explorers to the Kuril islands of Iturup and Kunashir believed that the wolves they saw there were the Japanese subspecies. In 1889, the wolf became extinct on Hokkaido island. In 1913, Hatta Suburō proposed that the wolf might be related to the Siberian wolf but had no living specimens to undertake further analysis. In 1931, Kishida Kyukishi described a skull from a wolf killed in 1881 and declared it to be a distinct subspecies. In 1935, Pocock examined one of the specimens in the British Museum that had been obtained in 1886 and named it Canis lupus rex because of its large size. The Ainu were to be found on Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril islands, and as far north as the Kamchatka Peninsula. The range of the Ezo wolf was the Hokkaido and Sakhalin islands, It became extinct on Hokkaido island in 1889. however, according to the Soviet zoologist Vladimir Heptner it had not been seen on Sakhalin at the beginning of the 20th century, with vagrant specimens of Siberian forest wolf occasionally crossing into the island via the Nevelskoy Strait, though not permanently settling. Information on the animal's presence on the Kuril islands is often contradictory or erroneous. It was tentatively recorded to inhabit Kunashir, Iturup and Paramushir, while wolves reported on Shumshu were later dismissed as feral dogs. A survey undertaken in the mid 1960s could not find a wolf on any of the Kuril islands but did find many feral dogs.