Rare Wolf Attack In Minnesota

This is very surprising news of a wolf attack on a person in northern Minnesota:

The DNR says it happened early Saturday morning at the West Winnie Campground on Lake Winnibigoshish in north-central Minnesota.

The boy, who is from northern Minnesota, was lying on his stomach at about 4:30 a.m. when the wolf approached him and bit him on the head.

"It sounds like he was in a head-down type of position," DNR Regional Manager Tom Provost. "He did not hear anything, and the first indication was when he had jaws clamped down on his head."

The 16-year-old boy suffered multiple puncture wounds and a laceration about 4 inches long. The wolf ran into the woods after the boy kicked it away.

The boy was treated for a serious but non-life threatening scalp laceration and a wolf that was trapped in the campground after it was closed is being tested for rabies.

Wolf attacks on humans in Minnesota have basically been non-existent until now, however livestock and pet attacks are a different story. In fiscal year 2012 Minnesota paid compensation on 111 verified incidents of wolf depredation on farm animals and pets.

Pet attacks are pretty much on local animals on their owner's property in the northern half of the state, but at least one last year was on a hunting dog working in the forest. 

I am sympathetic to compensating farmers and residents for wolf depredation losses on their land, but that's where it stops for me. I know a handful of people up north who would love to see the wolf driven to extinction and have talked big about SSS—"shoot, shovel and shut up"—but I know for a fact that they've never actually followed through with it. I empathize with their losses, but wolves are every bit a part of the northern half of the state as black flies and harsh winters. Deal with them or move.

Hopefully I haven't made wolves out as more dangerous to humans, pets, or livestock than they really are. Sammy the Wonder Dog and I tramped through the woods of northern Minnesota in the fall for almost all of her life and we never saw a wolf, though I bet a few saw us at some points. I've never seen one during any canoe or camping trips either. The truth is the closest I've come to seeing a wolf in Minnesota is this.

My guess is that the wolf that attacked that boy was fed multiple times, either deliberately or through sloppy food security at that campground. The same thing happens with bears on occasion. The pity is that when people do those things, it's the animals and the next campers who end up suffering, not the irresponsible idiots.

The first rule to avoiding dangerous human/animal contact in a campsite is one that has been repeated over and over for decades: Please don't feed the animals. Three more rules for campsites are not guaranteed to prevent problems with hungry animals, but make that far less likely:

1. Keep a very clean campsite. Don't leave food scraps lying about and don't leave partially burned food or grease in the fire pit/grate. Wash all dishes at least 100 feet away from the campsite and leave as little food debris as possible.
2. Never leave food unattended on the ground. If you have a car, secure your cooler and other foods inside it. Ditto for garbage unless there's a provided dumpster. In remote areas, bring some tough cloth bags to put your food and garbage in and enough rope to hang them from a tree(s). 
3. Never, NEVER!, eat in the tent that you will be sleeping in(or really any tent for that matter) and never sleep right next to the cooking area of your campsite, particularly out in the open. 

It's possible that the boy who was attacked violated that last rule, but I'm not certain of that.

I've lived by those rules for more than thirty years and I have never had a problem with bears, wolves, or lesser pain in the butt creatures. It takes a little more work, but not that much, and it's a heck of a lot better to go through that than wake up to a bear sniffing at your tent or coming back to find a chipmunk has chewed a hole in it. Or finding that food supply that you were counting on for the next few days has been completely ravaged.

We'll see what the Minnesota DNR and the Forest Service find in the next few days, but I'll be surprised if this is not a one-off that we won't see again for a long time. However, I think it would be good to check into how well the campground is being monitored and managed as part of the investigation as well. There apparently have been other reports of tents being damaged at that same campground. If that's the case, it might be time to shut down that campground for the rest of this year.