He can say whatever he wants about it. Until he shows some data or conducts a university-sanctioned study, it's just an opinion, albeit a somewhat informed opinion/observation. Besides that he's not a biologist. If you ask a wildlife biologist from the same university he will pull out 32 scientific studies stating otherwise.

If you read the scientific papers that are in print now, you can easily see that the vast majority of the studies do not support his statements. He is probably politically involved with the association to which he spoke and did not want the audience to shoot him.

After reading it again, I realized how far he's reaching in his conclusions. For one thing it's a little premature for him to be saying anything about "unnatural selection" or anything along those lines. We haven't even been studying wolves 1/100th of the time needed to detect trends in selection natural or not.

Just because wolves may not be showing behavior we expect them to show, doesn't mean there is a problem. Wolves have never been in this situation before either and to arbitrarily say that something they do is "unnatural" isn't sound science.

There are wolves everywhere I live and work and I've seen nothing that indicates they may not be afraid of humans, nor have there been any problems regarding livestock.

Wolves are often the scapegoat for any problem ranchers happen to be having. I'm more interested in understanding how other factors related to big game declines work in combination with increased wolf predation to lower populations. All research I have done indicates that while wolf predation is a problem in some populations, it's usually a problem because of some other (human caused) reason, and if we can correct that other reason then the big game population will be able to withstand wolf predation without decreasing. So everyone can win.