organized two national wolf hunting weeks, one in March and another in December. Anyone who killed a wolf and presented a pair of ears as proof was rewarded with a sheep and some felt. Each May, the government commanded the populace to scour the countryside for wolf lairs in an effort to exterminate wolf pups. When the inhabitants of a district believed it had destroyed its last wolf, the local government would proclaim a public holiday. Records show that up to 5,000 wolves were taken annually in the early 1930s. 4,000–4,500 wolves were killed annually in Mongolia in 1976. In the Kazakh SSR, some 1,000 professional hunters killed thousands of the wolves yearly to collect government bounties. In 1988, just before the Soviet economy collapsed, the hunters killed 16,000 wolves. North America In the majority of Native American hunter-gatherer societies, wolves were usually killed for body parts used in rituals, or to stop them raiding food caches, though some tribes would raid wolf dens to kill pups when wolf populations became too great for the Natives to live with. This also served as a method of acquiring food, as wolf pups were considered a delicacy. Native Americans were aware of the dangers of habituated wolves, and would quickly dispatch wolves following them too closely. Active hunting of wolves was rare because many tribes believed that such an act would cause game animals to disappear or bring retribution from other wolves. The Cherokee feared that the unjust killing of a wolf would bring about the vengeance of its pack mates, and that the weapon used for the deed would be useless in future unless exorcised by a medicine man. However, they would kill wolves with impunity if they knew the proper rites of atonement, and if the wolves themselves happened to raid their fish nets. When the Kwakiutl killed a wolf, the animal would be laid out on a blanket and have portions of its flesh eaten by the perpetrators, who would express regret at the act before burying it. The Ahtna would take the dead wolf to a hut, where it would be propped in a sitting position with a banquet made by a shaman set before it. When men from certain Inuit tribes killed a wolf, they would walk around their houses four times, expressing regret and abstaining from sexual relations with their wives for four days. Young Apaches