I can't expect you guys to understand.....I have to remember that.

Opinions are never worthless, however if your not trained to look at certain things then they aren't worth much. I'm not saying your woodsmanship is bad or worthless but if people aren't trained in science they tend to have tunnel vision when drawing conclusions from their own experiences. I'm not trying to be offensive.

Observations are not worthless. If I have made it sound that way I'm sorry that is not how I wanted it to sound.

Personal observations are good information always. But, the kicker is that those observations ONLY apply to that particular time, place, weather, and that entire set of circumstances. The problem with bad science is when people take a one or two time observation and try to apply that to a widespread area, like the state of Wyoming. Observations cannot replace random sampling. It's mathematically impossible to draw a reliable conclusion from a few observations.

So in effect you have a problem with the 90/10 rule. Where 10% of the bad incidents forms 90% of the opinion. Bad incidents like wolves killing livestock tend to breed fear and rumors and pretty soon everyones cousin Wally has had their baby eaten by wolves.

Also my personal opinion: watching a wolf eat an elk should not be classified as a 'problem incident'. We know and have known they do kill to eat. Now if it's attacking livestock that is another thing.

To really understand what is going on in a particular area you need to have a very large sample and it has to be totally random. Like the study that was done in Minnesota a few year back that I posted (there have been many more done in other areas).

They sampled a large number of farms and they did so randomly. This gives you a representative distribution. Instead of going out to the most remote farms in areas occupied by 3000 wolves and finding all sorts of problems.

Your conclusions will be false because essentially you only went looking for problems and you ignored the rest. So to say that wolves are a huge problem would be false because you don't know a) how big of a problem it is because you haven't looked anywhere else and b) it may only be a problem for 3% of the ranchers but you can't tell because that 3% of total ranchers was 100% of your sample.


To explain anymore in depth I would have to get into the principles of statistics and I don't really want to.




Also since you feel like attacking my personal experience: I live and work on a National forest that contains the biggest wilderness complex in the lower 48. I am lucky to still be young and unacademic enough to be able to work in the field 90% of the time. And we got wolves aplenty. I had a deer just about run into me when I was on a logging road and after it flew past two wolves came around the corner and just about knocked me over. They were pretty damn surpised. heh. I also have some friends fairly high up in Wildlife Services so I usually hear all about the wolf problems, sometimes before the public does.