I wonder how many understand the missions of the various land management agencies when they start complaining about wolves.
A popular example is the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. The National Park Service has a mission to preserve the natural state of things as best they can while providing for access by the public to experience the natural wonders of nature, for generations to come. The NPS does
not exist to provide breeding grounds so hunters have unlimited amounts of deer and elk to take to the slaughterhouse. They are attempting to restore natural populations within the parks as closely as they can to what was there before European expansion and settlement.
I don't see how anyone can complain about the wolf, elk and deer populations in a National Park, by and large there's no hunting within National Parks anyway. (Preserves and rec areas are managed differently.) And any wolf on private property outside a park is pretty much fair game.
People like to say that wolves and coyotes will eat all the elk and deer. Funny, wolves, coyotes, elk, moose, deer and everything else maintained a decent ebb and flow balance for eons before our interventionism took over. Wolf populations are likely to increase while other populations decrease, then the trend will reverse. Over time (not just a couple years here, over a
longer time) a balance will be seen.
Flipside example; I worked for a brief period in CO with the US Forest Service. I heard a fair bit of talk about folks complaining that Aspen was losing all its Aspen trees (in general CO's Aspens are in a poor state of affairs). There's a couple reasons for that, one of which is that there's so many elk in CO they nip all the seedlings before they can mature into trees to replace the old trees that are dying . But elk hunting is a big draw and money game for the state, so people would bitch if they lowered elk tag prices and took out a significant chunk of the population. No-win situation there.
So adding wolves to the mix could help restore a more natural balance and also benefit the forest lands. But wolves will kill all the elk, but we want our forests to maintain a balance, but we want to eradicate wildfire completely, etc. Guess what, you can't have it all. Appropriate and effective management utilizes
all available resources, natural and man-made, including original species.
Frankly, if there's more wolves here maybe we'll have less deer road kill and lower insurance premiums. MN born and raised I'd say probably about half the people I know have hit a deer at some point.
Really I don't care if people want to hunt wolves. Do it. We hunt everything else. But to say that they deserve to die horrible deaths and have no business here is truly ignorant. It's like the people in the new subdivisions complaining about the coyotes killing pet Fufu, which they let run loose in coyote habitat.
In the end it's all a money game, and I think that's a shame. People don't want competition because there's money to be made in ranching every inch of land, farming every inch of land, bulldozing and developing every inch of land, and hunting every inch of land. Then people want their children to be able to go someplace to understand what nature was like before we screwed it up. But don't put all the native animals back on that educational land, we don't want our kids to know there used to be wolves and coyotes here.
