The truth about wolves is hard to find

[chatnoir]

http://www.hcn.org/hcn/wotr/the-truth-about-wolves-is-hard-to-find

headline:

The truth about wolves is hard to find

I spent this winter in northwestern Montana close to the border of
Idaho's Panhandle, a place well known for its dense population of
wolves. To hear hunters tell it, I should have seen a deer or elk
skeleton every few feet on the forest floor and a lurking wolf behind
every tree. Game numbers have plummeted, they claim, as they affix
stickers that say "SSS" -- which stands for "Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-
up" -- on pickups, and don baseball caps that urge, "Smoke a Pack a
Day." And they're not talking about cigarettes.

I own guns. I support hunting, and the elk and deer meat from these
forests is luscious. An avid naturalist, I've walked, skied and driven
hundreds of miles over these mountains for eight months, including
every day during bow and rifle season.

Yet it took three months before I spotted wolf tracks and scat. It was
in November, the final week of rifle season. Three months later, I saw
my first wolf. Wolf sign did not become common until late winter
mating season, when scat and blood-laced urine appeared twice in one
week in the high country along creek drainages.

What I saw on the ground never matched the stories I heard or read
about in the newspapers, which blamed wolves for killing off the game.
My experience came closer to the claim of Kent Laudon, a Fish,
Wildlife and Parks wolf biologist, who estimates that there's one wolf
for every 39 square miles of game terrain in the Department of Fish,
Wildlife and Parks' Region One in northwestern Montana. He estimates
the average pack size at 6.7 animals.

Coming from Colorado, a state that manages elk herds with
sharpshooters and silencers, I was unprepared for the vitriol toward
wolves in northwestern Montana. When I listened to hunters gathered
around camo-decorated crock pots, they seemed to enjoy trashing these
animals. One line of attack went like this: "If we can't eat game,
we'll be forced to move to town. It's rural cleansing. Next, they'll
take away our guns."

Hunting guides complained that out-of-state clients were reluctant to
come to wolf-infested woods. Some taxidermists said they had lost
business, while ranchers claimed that wolf packs threatened their
livelihoods. Yet the figures show that only 97 cows were killed by
wolves in Montana in 2009. During that year, government statistics
showed that 2.6 million cattle, including calves, lived in the state;
therefore, the percentage of cattle killed by wolves was only 0.004
percent.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks cites a 15 percent increase in the
wolf population from 2010 to 2011, to around 653, as the justification
for increasing the quota for the 2012 wolf hunt. However, according to
Jay Mallonee, a wolf researcher and scientist for "Friends of
Animals," both figures are incorrect and impossible to substantiate
(Nature and Science Magazine: wolfandwildlifestudies.com/downloads/
natureandscience.pdf).... (cont)