Doctor McCleery's Wolf Park: Saving the Lobo from Extinction
Pennsylvania
In the nineteen twenties, the United States government ran an elimination program aimed at wiping out the lobo wolf, a subspecies of gray wolf, across the American West. The campaign nearly succeeded. Doctor Edward McCleery, a medical doctor working in McKean County, saw what was happening and decided to act.
He established a wolf park on his property near Port Allegany and dedicated decades to breeding and caring for the animals, turning the facility into an education center visited by scientists and the public alike. Thanks largely to his efforts, the lobo wolf survived. Descendants of the pack McCleery saved are today living in Montana, representing a surviving bloodline of a predator that shaped western ecosystems, Indigenous cultures, and the American imagination for thousands of years.
A country doctor in rural Pennsylvania kept them in the world.
