Meet the lobo, also known as the Mexican wolf or Canis lupus baileyi. This is the Southwest’s subspecies of gray wolf, and unlike its relatively stable cousins up in Canada, it’s struggling to survive. Although a Mexican wolf serves as the mascot at the University of New Mexico, there are more fans at a given football game than there are lobos alive on the planet. 

Lobo packs once thrived from Arizona through to Texas and down into Mexico, but Manifest Destiny had a different vision for that territory. In the 1800s Anglo pioneers cleared plains and forests of wolves’ natural prey (particularly ungulates like elk) and converted expanses of the Southwest into predator-free farms. In just a century, ranchers’ active hunting, trapping, and poisoning nearly drove the Mexican wolf to extinction; the species was completely wiped out of New Mexico in the 1920s. 

What now? Does does the lobo stand a chance of surviving in the years ahead?