You relate the old timer's story from the dark ages of the '20s and '30s. It's true that we nearly lost our wildlife at that time, hence my use of the term 'dark ages'. To attribute that situation to wolves is just wildly off base. Weren't there wolves in 1850? In 1880? Seems like we had some game running around then, didn't we? Places like PA, in fact the whole eastern half of the US,nearly ran out of whitetails in that same time frame (1920s), and they hadn't had wolves or cougars for many decades.

The real lesson from those old stories is that people are really handy at finding scapegoats for their problems that don't involve looking in the mirror. The Missoula newspaper just printed an article about hunting in the 1890s. You could shoot 8 deer, 8 bighorns, 8 mountain goats, and 3 elk in a season in Montana. The season ran from roughlyAugust through January. Do you think that maybe such liberal bag "limits" for human predators might be connected in some way to the lack of game in the 1920s?

Why didn't the Indians worry about wolves in the really old times? If you take a look at it, the Indians were killing as high a percentage of the game populations in those days as we do. Yet they never sweated bears and cougars and wolves, oh my. Note that they did, however, manage the habitat, burning off rangeland regularly to replenish the forage.

That, in my view, is more evidence for my personal view, that we overrate the effect of predators and underrate the effect of habitat.

I too, support having wolves managed by the states. "Managed" being a euphemism for issuing wolf tags.