If the history of wolves in Canada and wolves in the Lower 48 states was written as two separate books, they would have many chapters in common. As in the Lower 48 (and much of Europe centuries earlier), Canada's wolves were the target of aggressive extirpation campaigns for much the same reasons.

The first permanent settlers in Canada arrived from France and England - countries where for centuries wolves had been feared, hated and destroyed at every possible opportunity. Those attitudes were deep-rooted and easily perpetuated in the new land.

Wolves, as well as their prey species, were plentiful in the 18th century Canadian wilderness. On a practical level, the settlers perceived wolves as a threat to their livestock and livelihood, as well as the hoofed animals they hunted for food. On an ideological level, wolves were a symbol of the untamed and unpredictable wilderness, an obstacle to the settlers' ideals of civilization and control of their surroundings. These perceptions of wolves were not unique, and Canadian settlers were not the first to bring them to North America - pilgrims in New England set up bounty payments for dead wolves as early as 1630. Ontario and Quebec did not have wolf bounties until 1793.

Ultimately, those attitudes prevailed, and extirpation of wolves in Eastern Canada was largely successful - wolves were rare by the 1870s. Wolves were extinct in New Brunswick by 1880, in Nova Scotia by 1900 and had disappeared from Newfoundland by 1913.

By the mid-1700s more and more settlers from France, England and Europe were moving westward across Canada, and the practical and ideological hatred of wolves spread. Fur traders explored ever further into the wilderness, and forts, settlements, agriculture and improved transportation gradually followed. During the next 200 years, wars between the French and English; skirmishes among the indigenous tribes; intensive, more efficient trapping and hunting; and a gradual loss of habitat caused wolf numbers to decline. Those same factors helped decimate the wolves' primary prey species - bison, elk, deer, moose - and locked both predator and prey in a downward spiral.

The central provinces established wolf bounties in the 1800s. However, full-scale programs to eradicate wolves did not peak in western and northern Canada until the 1950s, when resource development brought more people into what had been sparsely populated wilderness. Farmers and ranchers wanted to kill wolves to protect their livestock, although there was little evidence of depredation before the wolves' natural prey species disappeared. Hunters wanted wolves killed to increase the stocks of big game animals.

But unlike the wolf population in the Lower 48, which declined steadily as settlers moved west, the Canadian wolf population see-sawed between growth and decline. Variations in the value of pelts, hunting and trapping regulations, as well as the intensity of extirpation campaigns based on aerial hunting, trapping and poison baits, all affected the wolf population. Wolf numbers also were linked to the availability of prey, which in turn fluctuated by forage and winter weather conditions, and hunting regulations.

During the past several decades wolves have been scarce in the southern regions of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. Elsewhere, populations varied by region, based on availability of prey, the fur market, and local government wildlife management policies.

Fortunately, several factors intervened to spare the Canadian wolves from the same fate as their cousins in the Lower 48, where wolves were extirpated from all but a tiny portion of their former territory. One, the overall density of Canada's human population never approached that of the Lower 48, leaving large, inhospitable wilderness areas available to wolves and their prey. Two, the public began to advocate for the conservation and preservation of nature before the wolves disappeared.

Overall, Canada's wolf population has remained fairly stable during the past decade, and recent statistics show all areas except Alberta have a stable or increasing number of wolves. Because the total population of wolves in Canada is substantial, they have no safeguard similar to the Endangered Species Act, which protects wolves in the Lower 48 states. Within regulations, the hunting and trapping of wolves is legal in all of Canada outside of national and provincial parks. About 3,000 wolves are taken annually for pelts.