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Was chatting with ccleroy today and I pulled up this picture to show him...I thought I'd share it here.

My trapping partner and I caught this male Coywolf in Jan of '18 just outside the town of Johnston in Edgefield County...Yes, Coywolves are real, not like the elusive cougar that people keep seeing but never have proof of...This one was just shy of 80# and quite fiesty...Notice the hackles standing up on it's back
...This is a real picture, no trick photography...You can see we are sitting at the edge of the catch circle and as close as we would dare...For those of you that are familiar with trapping, that's a MB 550 on it's right foot for size comparison.

Although rare, there have been numerous documented cases of other Coywolves caught in SC...A couple have come off of SRS that weighed over 70#...SCDNR has done the DNA research on
some of them and it traces back to Wolves from the Great Lakes region of North America...Those wolves occasionally
interbred with coyotes creating the Coywolf crossbreed...The DNA migration trail brings them down through the Mississippi Valley and on to here...The interesting thing is how we can have a Coywolf here and have no local Wolves...The "biologist-who-get-paid-to-figure-this-stuff-out-and-are-supposed-to-be-smarter-than-me" tell us that there are recessive genes that may lay dormant for generations in coyotes, and when the right pair mates they could throw an offspring that receives a double dose of those genes...I would think that means that a litter of Coyote pups could be mostly normal but have 1 Coywolf pup in it...Mother Nature is freaky like that.

I also have heard tales of a Saluda County guy that had an exotic animal farm...Lions, tigers, bears, leopards and of course wolves...He ran into trouble with DHEC over permits and conditions and loaded up and moved to Colorado where regulations on that kind of exotic farming are more relaxed...Story goes the wolves "got away"..................