Now lets get down to business if there is any intellegence left out there. I have read everything I can get my hands on. Think about this rationally. To kill twelve full grown cow elk in one sitting you would have to have a super pack. Elk are still strong and it takes 2 or 3 wolves to bring one down and a few minutes to kill it by suffocation.
Ok so here goes our little scenario. So a pack of 9 see an elk herd. They break up in groups of 3. Each group attaks the herd and takes down a cow. Thats 3 elk on the ground while. After 2 or 3 minutes and strangling the elk the pack gets back up then after using all that energy they take off after the elk herd that has been running for 3 minutes, they catch up, take down another 3 cows and repeat until they get 12 cows.
You need to get up from your computer, drive you car out of the city & watch a wolf kill a elk for yourself.
I watched twelve cow elk on the winter range north of Yellowstone national park get hamstrug by a pack of 17-wolves. The elk could not run away fast enough. The elk were breaking through the crust on the snow. The wolves were not breaking through, they were running on top of it.
The wolves did not take the elk down and sufficate them. They grab ahold of the hamstrings (flank) on the rear leg of the cows and ripped at them with there teeth. Every elk they did this to stopped running. They chased & cripped these elk until they had twelve crippled out of a herd of 250-300 elk. They went back to the elk that were still alive and ripped there stomchs open. The only thing they ate was the fetus. After they ate the fetuses the wolf pack moved on in the direction the herd of elk was headed. I did not follow them to see what happend next. I did walk up to the twelve elk to look at them. I was trying to figure out why they did this? I have been told they will do this type of killing when the snow conditions are right. They said the adult wolves do this to teach there young how to kill.