Originally Posted by
tangozulu
An interesting perspective for sure but here is another. Maybe stop viewing the return of the wolf as a wildlife 9-11 and instead look at the situation as an opportunity to return hunting and wildlife management back to a simpler time.
Yes the elk will need to reach back into their collective memories in order to co-exist with wolves, but like riding a bike I believe they are capable of it. As intelligent and extremely well equiped humams we should be at least willing to try the same.
Is winter feeding of thousands of elk in Wyoming really doing hunters or elk any good? Do you really belive Spider Bull is a real elk? Is it just a coinsidence that in a the last century mother nature managed to create only 2 or 3 elk that could score better than 400 B and C points and now 400-450 bulls are behind every other tree? Because Spider never faced a 4 legged predater and only very controlled 2 legged ones we think he is somehow the "best" elk ever? Spider is and was just a coddled cow and if he lived in the real elk world would have never lived to become the frankenelk he was. Do we really want to continue with high fenceing and feed supplements in our wildlife "management" tool box. I don't.
Just maybe we can look at what our sport has become and turn a page back. Maybe we can look at elk as more than just another commodoty sold to the highest bidder and just maybe we can get another generation interested in the tradition of hunting. It has become little more than another game that needs to be made more "extreme" to be popular. Biggest horns or longest range killing being examples.
My last elk hunt I managed to let my 4 year old daughter hear her first wolves howling outside the tent. Of course all the elk we were watching left for the next mountain but I'm sure she didn't care and I didn't mind either. They would be back.
For all the reasons it is getting harder and harder to hunt, wolves are not one of them. Doesn't even come close to what the outfitting lobby is doing both in tieing up access to land and tags. But that is another issue.
You can't "turn back the page", the prior chapter is gone. Why is it people can't understand that the ecosystem today is vastly different than it was 200 years ago? Elk didn't live in the mountains, they lived in groups on the lowlands and prairies, they were graze animals and have no defense intate or otherwise against wolf predation in a mountain environment. Biologist as recently as a few months ago have determined that certain areas in Idaho and Montana have lost the sustainability of elk poulations and they will not recovery, ever. There is no prior history of wolf/elk dynamics in the current ecosystem, it is fantasy. The wolf was re-introduced here to appease green whackos, plain and simple. I keep hearing this nonsensicle argument that we are "going back" to the way it was, but it was never like this before.