BrutalAttack

Yes because there is an extreme shortage of moose around these parts.

caselesss5

this is how i look at the wolf issue: i say kill every one you see

but no matter where you stand on the issue the clear line i draw when it comes to wolves is the safety of my family, friends and my way of life. i live in idaho and i know several people that have hunted in areas that are know to have wolves. one of my best hunting buddies killed an elk two years ago and before he could even get to his animal there were six wolves already on it. he said one even charged him and another started to circle around to try and stalk HIM!

now when the wolves get that numerous and that bold....i start shootin'

racowboy

If people were allowed to shoot every wolf they see, do you honestly beleive that the wolves would be gone? They were not eraticated by shooting them, it was through years of trapping and poison. Europe burned forests to remove them. Wyoming sounds a little farfetched with their wolf plan, but it would most likely only give them a happy medium of having a few wolves around that are too nervous to cause problems and hang around ranches killing livestock. Not to have so many wolves as to cause too much of a dent in the big game herds. The sadest part of this whole wolf deal is that we have learned nothing from our elders. I remember a talk that I had several years ago with a 90 year old woman who was raised in some of the best deer hunting country you can imagine. We could see several deer from her house on the Salmon River, Graves Creek drainage and I said "Geeze, with as many deer as there are here, I can't even imagine how many there must have been when you were a kid", she looked at me like I was an idiot and said "What do you mean? There were no deer here when I was a child. I saw my first deer when I was 16 and didn't even know what it was. If the settlers lost a cow , there children might not survive the winter and they shot every predator they could. After years of doing this, the deer finally had a chance to get a foothold in this area". Why is it that all the changes we make to our environment are considered bad? I like the fact that we have deer and elk, that when I pack in I can worry about where I'll find my elk in the morning instead of what's going to eat my horse that night. You will learn more talking with elders and spending time in the woods than listening to a professor who sits in a University trying to convince everyone that he is an expert on the woods.
Another situation I have seen was the guy who bought several thousand acres of Joseph Plains to log and have a private hunting preserve. After a few years of not letting anyone else hunt on his property, all the deer and elk disappeared, bear and cougar were all over the place and cattle were disappearing like crazy. He had turned that property back into what it used to be. He was also smart enough to realize what he had done, let people in to shoot predators (where I come in) and reversed the situation.

trouthunter

Does Alberta have a wolf season?? Idaho doesn't! I think a lot of hunters wouldn't bitch so much about the wolves if we had a season on 'em down here.

trouthunter

racowboy- great post!

I grew up just up the creek from ya in New Meadows. I remember talking to the oldtimers on how there was never any elk in the valley till they brought them in by train back in the 30's. Before that they had the wolves and griz wiped out to protect the livestock.

I posted earlier that I wasn't against a wolf re-introduction, but I was heavily apposed to how they wanted to go about doing it. My worst fears came true this fall when I was up Hazard Creek for my archery hunt. I let out a bugle to see if I could fire up a bull, and in return I got the call of the wolf. An aquaintence who guides out of the rapid river area said he actually heard the wolves imitating the elk so to locate them easier.

Anyways, it is just too little too late in my opinion with these Idaho wolves. We should have let the ranchers kill 'em on sight years ago, and there should be a season on them with a female take, similar to how we do couger, in place as well.

Us Humans re-introduced them, now us humans need to put control on them! Until then, shoot, shovel & shut up.

salty

Amen to that... just keep doing what you are doing and you will make a difference!

Dirt2

You relate the old timer's story from the dark ages of the '20s and '30s. It's true that we nearly lost our wildlife at that time, hence my use of the term 'dark ages'. To attribute that situation to wolves is just wildly off base. Weren't there wolves in 1850? In 1880? Seems like we had some game running around then, didn't we? Places like PA, in fact the whole eastern half of the US,nearly ran out of whitetails in that same time frame (1920s), and they hadn't had wolves or cougars for many decades.

The real lesson from those old stories is that people are really handy at finding scapegoats for their problems that don't involve looking in the mirror. The Missoula newspaper just printed an article about hunting in the 1890s. You could shoot 8 deer, 8 bighorns, 8 mountain goats, and 3 elk in a season in Montana. The season ran from roughlyAugust through January. Do you think that maybe such liberal bag "limits" for human predators might be connected in some way to the lack of game in the 1920s?

Why didn't the Indians worry about wolves in the really old times? If you take a look at it, the Indians were killing as high a percentage of the game populations in those days as we do. Yet they never sweated bears and cougars and wolves, oh my. Note that they did, however, manage the habitat, burning off rangeland regularly to replenish the forage.

That, in my view, is more evidence for my personal view, that we overrate the effect of predators and underrate the effect of habitat.

I too, support having wolves managed by the states. "Managed" being a euphemism for issuing wolf tags.

jones123

Okay, I get your point (thanks tothe smiley guy with the glasses rolling his eyes).So if moose abound, I think there should be more moose tags to go along with wolf tags.

trouthunter

I didn't attribute the situation to wolves. I stated that Elk were shipped in by rail. Most of the wolves and Griz (predators) had been killed off by ranchers (humans) by then, leavingno major predator threat other than the solitary cougar and black bear for these elk. The big thing to mention is that at this time game management was in place, and these new elk herds were then managed (tags). When the herd grew, and graze land and farm lands were threatened by the elk, depredation tags were in place to "thin" them outeven more.

Way back before the "dark ages" as you put it, there was no game management. We all know the effects us humans have had globally on game animals taken with no control. It was thru game conservationalists like Theodore Roosevelt and others that started the wheel for the game management we see today.

My big beef is where was this management plan when they introduced the wolves?? The biggest mistake made was letting it go to the federal government to decide. It should have went to the state level to begin with. It's been over 10 years now, and still in the hands of the Feds, with the possibility of "oh, you can manage your wolves when all 3 states come up with an "approved" plan, and then we'll let ya have them". So, us Idahoans get to sit here on our hands and wait for our neighbors to figure out the plan of attack, all the while the wolf population escalates out of control. Hmmm...good plan!
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BrutalAttack

Read my other posts above if you haven't yet. Trust me: Fish and Game would like nothing more than to have wolves delisted. The ball is in Wyomings court and unfortunately they seem to be sitting on it.