Staff from Woliński National Park are searching for Kamyk the three-legged wolf following his escape.
A national park in Poland is searching for a three-legged wolf it had in its care after a car accident but which escaped by digging a tunnel out of its enclosure. The young male, named Kamyk (Pebble), has often been spotted by tourists running on local beaches. Staff from Woliński National Park in northwest Poland say that, although the wolf is not aggressive towards humans, it should not be fed. They have also urged anyone who spots the animal to notify the park authorities. In 2020, aged around five months, Kamyk was found in a roadside ditch after, most probably, being hit by a car. The wolf was not moving, and his wounds were infested with fly larvae, suggesting he might have been lying on the side of the road for a couple of days. The animal, which was initially mistaken for a dog, was reported to a local dog welfare organisation and then transported to a veterinarian in the city of Szczecin, where he underwent an operation. The operation on his back legs, widely reported by local media at the time as the first such procedure in Poland, was successful. But Kamyk, who was named after the town of Kamień Pomorski (meaning Pomeranian Stone) near where he was found, started gnawing one of his front paws. It turned out that the nerve plexuses had been crushed during the accident. The limb was inert and the wolf treated it like a foreign body that it was trying to get rid of.
continue reading
Apparently, they would have put the wolf down had they known about the injury to his front leg yet there he is running around free for the last 3.5 months apparently able to survive despite his handicap.