As usual, my personal opinion on this comfounds people who know me as a gun owner and hunter, but what the hey, I'll spout off.

I'll tell you the wolves I've seen in the wilderness are really special, at the same level of quality for me as harvesting edible game. I would never think of killing one (can't eat it after all), and really think that they are an important indicator of wilderness and the part of wilderness I love.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no objection to the guys in my party who indicated they'd have shot the wolves I saw and I have no problem with people who trap them to sell the furs - I have wolf fur garments. It's just that I don't believe they should be hunted or trapped into oblivion and personally don't have any problem if some wolf kill of game means less to go around for us hunters. If it got to be an ecological imbalance, I'd have a different opinion.

I do have a problem with the guys who really think every wolf they see or that exists needs to be killed and that their hunting is more important than the wolves. And I really have a problem with the guys I hunt with who let it be known that I'm f.o.s. because I don't kill them. These are all my personal opinions and I have no animosity towards my friends and fellows who differ. -zeke

Research done recently supports both sides of the issue.

Generally two things happen when wolves are introduced as an additional predator:

1. the wovles eat the "harvestable surplus" that would have died from environmental factors or disease anyway. This has been shown in Alaska and elsewhere. When wolves were removed, prey populations did not increase or continued to decline due to weather etc. This means the the prey population was experiencing "compensatory mortality" which means that the wolves were killing animals that would have died anyway from other factors.

2. wolf mortality is in addition to other sources of mortality. This happens in populations that are mainly stablized by predation, meaning predation is the most limiting factor to prey numbers, not weather or anything else. This is called "additive mortality". In this case wolf predation can hurt population numbers, however, numerous studies show that wolf removal only helps prey populations a little bit, to really increase prey population, multi-species predator removal has to occur (bear, cougars also etc. ).

The main lesson in this is: predators should not be blamed first for elk decline...habitat must be looked at first as the main factor.

Also, let us not forget the benefits of predation on an elk herd.

1. usually older, younger, or sick animals are killed. This increases production of the female prey species, and can increase the fitness of calves if they escape. This means smarter calves that are less likely to get killed in the next years.

2. predation tends to disperse large groups of prey, this reduces the chance of communicating disease, and stimulates prey species to occupy new habitat and disperse to new areas where they can get more food and reproduce more.

3. predation allows for less dense populations. This means more food is available per indivdual elk and may reduce competetion with other species like deer or cattle. This means less elk but bigger bulls.

4. wolves will only kill elk up to a certain point. when elk herds get low, they will either switch to other prey or leave the area where hunting is better. Allowing elk to be even more productive in the absense of that predator.

5. if elk populations are high, additional predation will lower populations below carrying capacity, where you will have less total elk, but the yearly surplus or growth rate of the population will be much higher and more calves will be produced each year.

6. wolf removal only helps if the elk population is already below carrying capacity (limited by food) with room to increase. If it's not then wolves are only eating elk that would have died anyway (from starvation, disease etc.).

Saw your other post on another wolf thread. Read the same opinion. Don't agree totally with it but that's the way it is. Elk depredation is not the only reason, there are a lot of other factors that seem questionable such as the fox predation by coyotes and small game numbers that have to be considered. All of which IMHO opinion are pure fiction. BUT I only take offense to the blame it on Wyo statement. Nothing personal, just a bit over the top. Wolves don't just eat unhealthy elk, there are more domestic animals that are taken by wolves than is being reported, Deer, moose and antelope are fair game as well. The wolf will prosper and we will deal with it in our way AFTER the court battle. Your hunting opportunities will be protected as best we can and on the same note you will pay more for that opportunity as a result.

[4. wolves will only kill elk up to a certain point. when elk herds get low, they will either switch to other prey or leave the area where hunting is better. Allowing elk to be even more productive in the absense of that predator.
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And then thet switch to Lamas,Sheep,Cattle. It doesn't matter what the Elk Population is the wolves are killing these other animals NOW!
I hope to go to Disney land someday so maybe I can understand[:'(]

The Wyoming statement isn't meant to offend anyone. It's a simple fact that the state game agency is holding up the effort to get them delisted. The fact is wolves can't be managed (controlled) by states until they finish their plan. It's not an opinion or anything against wyoming it's simply what's happening right now.

Wolves that kill domestic animals are fair game for ranchers to kill and they are often removed or killed if they reoffend. Also, I'm sure you know that ranchers are reimbursed for all losses.

No wolves don't just eat unhealthy elk. But in terms of probability, they are more likely to kill an unhealthy/injured animal than a healthy one.

The effects of factors other than wolf predation on elk are not pure fiction, they have been documented. Like I said before, not all elk populations are primarily regulated by predation wolf or otherwise.

This is an exerpt from a well know study on Yellowstone wolf predation.
The entire thing can be found here:
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/2...rity/Intro.htm

The wolves in our study killed elk at rates similar to wolves hunting caribou (Rangifer tarandus; Mech et al. 1998:110) and tended to kill calves, old cows, and individuals with low marrow fat (unhealthy).

In summary, the relationships between reintroduced YNP wolves and previously wolf-free elk did not differ in any way that we could detect from wolf-prey relations in long-extant (this means systems that always had wolf-elk predation occuring) systems. This was true despite the high ratio of prey available to wolves and the large number of unculled prey. Furthermore, the degree of winter severity affected the new wolf-elk system in much the same way it affects long-extant systems. These findings suggest a dominating influence of winter severity on wolf predation patterns (Mech et al. 1998).

With a wink and a smile - Just who did the survey? Surveys can and are skewed to benift whomever pays the most. Yeah Yeah I'm bitter but I am in an area where you believe NONE of what you hear and only HALF of what you see.

go and check it out for yourself. Only you can decide if you believe the scientists or not. The data is in there if you want to look at it. Studies like that are not the gospel, but they can help us see things that we would not otherwise see.

I have looked at their data and I would have drawn alot of the same conclusions. One thing you may or may not realize is the "conclusions" that they draw are really only valid in that particular situation. Not all elk herds are the same, nor is the dynamic between elk and predators the same in different areas. However, studies like that one are good at drawing general conclusions and helping us to know what we might expect to see in a similar situation where wolves are introduced.

One other thing I forgot to mention: that study was done over a pretty short time period like a year or two. To really get a good idea of whats happening we would want to take data for 8 or 10 years to really start to see correlations. But we can still make general conclusions using shorter time periods or smaller samples.

damn double post[:'(]

I started this thread to get ideas from both sides, those for and against the wolf being back. Montana Bob, Poluke do you have any ideas as to the "problems" you guys feel exists or will exist in the future? Remember the wolf is here to stay so a "kill em all" statement is a waste of breath. What do you think we should do?