WHEN WOLVES GO MAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19418, 28 August 1926, Page 2 (Supplement)

WHEN WOLVES GO MAD.

NEW TERROR IN RUSSIA. HUNDRED THOUSAND STRONG. CAMPAIGN BY SOVIET. EXTERMINATION OF PESTS. An appalling report of mad wolves and their work conies from Russia. In the Russia which the Soviet Republics rule there ar6, it is said, a hundred thousand wolves, and rabies is rampant among them. The wolves go mad and bite other animals, chiefly dogs and cats,- and there is a terrible plague of hydrophobia in the land. During a single year there have been no fewer than 28,000 cases of persons bitten by these mad animals, while in the Ukraine in the same period the number reached the almost incredible total of 295,000. No wonder the Pasteur institutions which deal with this dreadful malady are overcrowded, says an English writer, and that the Soviet Government

is organising a national campaign for the extermination of wolves. .Russia always- has had wolves, and deaths from their bites have ever to be added to the deaths of people killed for food by these ravenous animals. But the figures given above are a tenfold increase during the last ten years. The writer says; " It is an impressive thought that, while political difference and hideous mismanagement of affairs engage the energies of the rulers of Russia, such perils rage unchecked. We get hydrophobia from the wolves and jackals of the wilds anij plague from the marmots. It is tsle'a'lily established that when the last great flame of plague advanced across Asia and Europe, it originated \yith the marmots, the fur-hunters nad gone, to seek. Tlie men brought back the furs of their prey, arid 'in the furs travelled the parasite from which plague arises, ••'lt was carried to China, and spread East and West. And the plague germs a,re on the wild marmots to-day, awaiting new generations of incautious hunters. We have only to remember these facts to understand some of the great mysteries of early history, when tribes and nations vanished, smitten to death by agencies' unexplained. " There is a man in England' who can tell us something of the horrors of contact with mad animals. He is Colonel Sir

Henry JtfcMahon, one of the men by whom history has been made on the wild frontiers of India. One difficult and dangerous task he accomplished 20 years ago was to carry out a survey to define the boundary between Persia and Afghanistan in Siestan. It was terrible work, through waterless and unknown desert, where the temperature sank regularly below zero, and in two and a-naif years it cost the lives of 50 men. " One night during a bitter storm a mad lone wolf indulged in an orgy of hate. The native members of the expedition, fearing that their dogs would be infected from bites, had every one of them killed. So the solitary wolf crept in unperceived and ran amok. Before it could be discovered and .killed it bit 78 camels and one horse. The horse died mad, and so did 48 camels. What a night of terror that was, with the wolf running loose and spreading death, and an icy blizzard blowing at the rate of 120 miles an hour! " In the thinly-peopled parts of Russia and the Ukraine, where this plague of madness and assaults continues now, many such hideous nights as luis must be experienced, with madness in the woods among the wolves, madness in the streets and kennels among the dogs and cats, and, worst of all, niadness in the home. Canada in New World, Russia and countries near Home, Spain and Italy among them, are up in arm's against the -volf. A crusade is coming, no longer against Saracen or Turk, but against an older enemy, whose feasts rob folds, whose bite is a terrible death. The wolf must go."