ORIGINAL: racowboy
Do the people of Northern Idaho realize that we did not have deer and elk here before culling the predators? The Native Americans of our area lived on fish and migrated to hunt elk and buffalo that anyone who has done a little homework knows were plains animals. Guess why Lewis and Clark ate their horses when they traveled through the Lochsaw region. Wasn't because they were tripping over elk! Who was there before them that shot out all the game? So people overhunted them back then...hell, nobody was here but predators! I say the changes we have made that allowed and brought the deer and elk to our area are good and the wolf thing is a bad idea. Please do some homework and don't call our settlers stupid or ignorant for telling us how it really was.
Dirt and Brutalattack, you do a good job of stirring the pot....seems that is what you are trying to do.
Which begs the question: if there were no deer or elk here before as you say, then what did allthe predators eat? Each other I suppose? [8D]There had to have been a prey base to support all those nasty, evil predators that we had to kill off.
Yeah great point there...
"Wilderness areas" have never had highgamedensitiesby virtue of the fact that most of the high quality forage doens't occur at altitude. So it is quite possible and probably likely that in Lewis and Clarks limited travels through the most rugged parts of the continental divide, they didn't exactly go through prime elk country at the time. Most game was likely concentrated on the grassland areas where food was more abundant and predators could be seen further away. That isn't a very strong argument considering that fact that they traveled into and out of the area by the same route and didn't exactly survey the entire country for wildlife.