TRENDING
August 24, 2025
When Charles Darwin set foot on the Falkland Islands in 1833, he was struck by the behavior of the archipelago’s only native land mammal. The Falkland Islands wolf, known locally as the warrah, was unlike any predator he had ever seen. Instead of shying away from humans, it approached them with a disarming boldness, sometimes even wagging its tail like a domestic dog.
That friendliness, scientists now agree, was its undoing.
The Falklands wolf, Dusicyon australis, was a curious anomaly: a large canid isolated hundreds of miles from mainland South America. It holds the tragic distinction of being the first canid to go extinct in recorded history. With no natural predators and no history of human contact before European settlement, it evolved without fear of people. Settlers arriving in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found it so approachable that it could be killed with ease, sometimes lured with a scrap of meat and dispatched with a knife.
By the middle of the nineteenth century its fate was already sealed. Sheep farming had become the economic backbone of the islands, and the wolf, though likely scavenging more than hunting livestock, was branded a menace. Ranchers placed bounties on its head, hunting and poisoning it relentlessly. “Within a very few years,” Darwin wrote in his journals, “the race will be extinct.” He was right. The last confirmed individual was killed in 1876, just decades after his warning.
Recent genetic research has solved one of the enduring mysteries surrounding the species: how it reached the Falklands in the first place. Studies suggest its ancestors crossed a frozen strait from South America around sixteen thousand years ago, during the last Ice Age, when lower sea levels may have briefly connected the islands to the mainland. Once marooned, it adapted to a predator free environment, growing tame in a way that would later prove catastrophic.
Unlike other extinct animals whose downfall stemmed from habitat destruction or competition, the warrah’s story is singular. It vanished not because it was too fierce, but because it was too trusting. Its lack of fear, the very trait that defined it, made it an easy target for humans, and within a single human lifetime the species was gone.
Today only taxidermy specimens remain in museums, a ghostly reminder of an animal that once greeted strangers with wagging tails. The Falkland Islands wolf’s extinction is a cautionary tale, a stark reminder of how quickly trust can be exploited and how a species’ gentleness can become its greatest vulnerability.