Quick Take
- A taxidermist took one look at a dead animal and immediately stopped everything to make a phone call. What he recognized would go on to change conservation history.
- Wildlife officials spent years publicly begging ranchers to report this animal and found nothing, but then a dog solved the mystery overnight. See the colony discovered →
- The species survived extinction by the slimmest possible margin, and the number of animals responsible is almost unbelievably small. See how few survived →
- Decades later, conservationists returned the recovered population to the exact same ground where a ranch dog made that accidental find, and the reason why they chose that location matters. See the return location →
At about 3 a.m. on September 26, 1981, cattle rancher John Hogg and his wife, Lucille, were woken up by their dog barking just outside the bedroom window, according to an account from the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. They figured Shep had tangled with a porcupine again and went back to sleep.
The next morning, Hogg found what Shep had actually caught: the carcass of a small animal with a black mask, black feet and a black-tipped tail, its back broken. Lucille thought it might be worth getting mounted, so the couple drove it into Meeteetse to the local taxidermist. He took one look, went quiet, and said he needed to make a phone call.
A Species Nobody Expected to See Again
The animal was a black-footed ferret. The last wild population had vanished by the mid-1970s, and the last one in captivity died in 1979, so by every official account, the species was extinct.
The taxidermist’s call reached Wyoming wildlife officials, and biologists soon arrived at the Hogg ranch. Surveys, trapping and radio tracking turned up a small colony living quietly on the Hogg property and the neighboring Pitchfork Ranch: about 120 to 130 ferrets, the last known wild population on the planet.
That colony was a long shot nobody had managed to find on purpose. In the late 1970s, Wyoming newspapers had run stories and ads asking ranchers to report any sightings of the species, and none ever turned up. It took a dog’s late-night encounter to do what years of searching could not.
A Close Call Before the Comeback
Biologists spent the next few years watching the colony, but in the summer of 1985, disease tore through it. Canine distemper and plague hit the ferrets and their main food source, prairie dogs, at the same time, and the population crashed.
Wildlife managers brought six ferrets into captivity that fall to try to start a breeding program. All six caught distemper and died within weeks, according to Wyoming Game and Fish. “There was a big debate about what to do with them, once we found them,” former Wyoming Game and Fish biologist Bob Oakleaf later said. “There was certainly a camp that felt strongly about capturing the ferrets and getting them into captivity as soon as possible.” By February 1987, officials had pulled every ferret they could find out of the wild: seven males and 11 females, 18 animals in total. That was the entire breeding population of the species.
Back to the Same Ranches
Those 18 ferrets became the foundation of a captive breeding program, run first by Wyoming Game and Fish and later joined by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and zoos around the country. Reintroductions began in Wyoming in 1991 and eventually reached 29 sites across eight states, Canada and Mexico.
In 2016, the species came home. Wildlife officials released 35 captive-bred ferrets onto the same two ranches, the Hoggs’ and the Pitchfork, where Shep had found that first carcass 35 years earlier, marking the species’ return to the ground where it was rediscovered. Nearly every black-footed ferret alive today can trace its ancestry back to that original Meeteetse colony, all because a ranch dog brought something strange home one night and a taxidermist knew exactly what he was looking at.
