If people were allowed to shoot every wolf they see, do you honestly beleive that the wolves would be gone? They were not eraticated by shooting them, it was through years of trapping and poison. Europe burned forests to remove them. Wyoming sounds a little farfetched with their wolf plan, but it would most likely only give them a happy medium of having a few wolves around that are too nervous to cause problems and hang around ranches killing livestock. Not to have so many wolves as to cause too much of a dent in the big game herds. The sadest part of this whole wolf deal is that we have learned nothing from our elders. I remember a talk that I had several years ago with a 90 year old woman who was raised in some of the best deer hunting country you can imagine. We could see several deer from her house on the Salmon River, Graves Creek drainage and I said "Geeze, with as many deer as there are here, I can't even imagine how many there must have been when you were a kid", she looked at me like I was an idiot and said "What do you mean? There were no deer here when I was a child. I saw my first deer when I was 16 and didn't even know what it was. If the settlers lost a cow , there children might not survive the winter and they shot every predator they could. After years of doing this, the deer finally had a chance to get a foothold in this area". Why is it that all the changes we make to our environment are considered bad? I like the fact that we have deer and elk, that when I pack in I can worry about where I'll find my elk in the morning instead of what's going to eat my horse that night. You will learn more talking with elders and spending time in the woods than listening to a professor who sits in a University trying to convince everyone that he is an expert on the woods.
Another situation I have seen was the guy who bought several thousand acres of Joseph Plains to log and have a private hunting preserve. After a few years of not letting anyone else hunt on his property, all the deer and elk disappeared, bear and cougar were all over the place and cattle were disappearing like crazy. He had turned that property back into what it used to be. He was also smart enough to realize what he had done, let people in to shoot predators (where I come in) and reversed the situation.