Jacques Mallet has said he hopes to have the 86-pound animal stuffed.Jacques Mallet has said he hopes to have the 86-pound animal stuffed. (Roger Lanteigne)New Brunswick has its first confirmed wolf killing in more than a century.
DNA tests show a large animal shot on the Acadian Peninsula last month was a wolf, hunter Jacques Mallet told CBC News on Tuesday.
Mallet said he recently received a short report, confirming the animal he shot was a wolf and not a coyote, or a mixture of the two.
He’s surprised by the results and wants to know more, he said.
Mallet has now sent the animal’s body to the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John for further testing, he said.
The last time a wolf was reported killed in the province was in 1876, provincial wildlife official have said.
Wolves were believed to have been hunted to extinction after the province starting offering a bounty in 1858 of 15 shillings for every wolf killed.
Mallet shot the wolf at Saint-Simon, near Caraquet. It weighed 86 pounds — about three times bigger than an average coyote.
Don McAlpine, a zoologist at the New Brunswick Museum, could not be reached for comment Tuesday. But in a previous interview, he told CBC News he figured it was "just a matter of time before a wolf turned up" in New Brunswick.
He said there had been a number of confirmed wolves in Quebec, south of the St. Lawrence, in the past decade, and about 10 in the northern New England states.
Department of Natural Resources officials also could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Mallet hopes to have the animal stuffed.

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