Wolves

[Polishrifleman]

The Wolf is a hot topic at different points here on THR and this site just came across my screen in a search I was doing and I wanted to share with the broadest audience possible. I have also posted this on APS as this thread isn't really hunting specific but there are hunting and managment issues dealt with in the site. Some very good reading.

http://www.pinedaleonline.com/wolf/

 

[Harve Curry]

So how will the reintroduction of northern wolves & Mexican grey wolves affect huntable numbers of deer, elk, turkey, and antelope?

 

[paintballdude902]

it could be a very good thing and may very well help to balance the eco system

 

[MDHunter]

Huh??

Harve and Paintball, are you serious? harve, I thik there are some wolves loose in southern NM, search some of the past posts on here and you should find some info. As for their effect on mule deer and elk, just ask the guys in Wyoming and Idaho what they think about the wolf reintroduction programs there, and you'll get your answer.

Paintball, you should search the posts also, the wolves haven't exactly "balanced the populations" - lotta hunters not finding deer/elk anymore in the areas where the grey wolves have been reintroduced.

 

[Art Eatman]

Go to the Michael Crichton thread, scroll down in his article, and read about the NPS mismanagement of Yellowstone. All that bears directly upon the posts above.

Then come back and follow up, here.

 

[Harve Curry]

I'm right where wolves are being reintroduced. My take on it is wolves are a big intelligent wild dog, that enjoy the chase and killing. They don't just kill what they eat, or eat what they kill. They kill and go get another because it's fun. They like milk so the udders of beef mother cows are good to eat, even before the calves. They will make a dent in the huntable numbers of big game which will effect the local economy. Game & Fish Departments won't really care because they will eventually realize hunting revenues for wolf tags, once the wolf is successfully reintroduced. It's all about the Endangered Species Act, anti hunting animal rights activists, earth first types. When you think about it many of the same groups that support wolf reintroduction are the same folks who don't support 2nd Amendment Rights.

 

[walking arsenal]

We could use more wolves up here.

They would keep the deer population down a bit.

Coyotes too.

But all the folks up here think they are going to eat red riding hood on her way to grandmas so they shoot them.

 

[rnr4me]

But all the folks up here think they are going to eat red riding hood on her way to grandmas so they shoot them.

Might be something to it. Coyotes are getting more and more agressive especially where there's no pressure. I think that only the predator hunters are keeping them down.



Not a photoshop. This coyote bit the board of one boarder and went for a 4 yr old skiing w/ dad. Dad (bigger body) moving in stopped the attack.

Wolves are much bigger, more agressive and not afraid of us.

 

[qwert65]

wolves could be good as far as culling out some of the weak prey

 

[Diggers]

I went and scanned through that speech by Crichton...............meh.

He seems to make a lot of statements with out backing it up with much.

His statement on the book Population Bomb was just weird. You would get the idea from what Crichton said that the world population has been going DOWN since the 1960's. Obviously that is not true.

The National Parks were "managed" the way people of that day thought things should be done. There was little to no science involved in the decisions made. Which is why they killed off the wolves, not knowing that they play an important role in the ecosystem.
I believe that the methods used today to manage Parks is quite a bit more advanced.

If anything the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has shown that they in fact do balance the ecosystem.

The other human related problems with wolves is a different issue.

Now if you are just worried about keeping the elk or deer populations as high as possible for hunting purposes.....then yes wolves would be seen as a problem.

However, if you are looking at creating a healthy whole ecosystem that is self sustaining, then ALL fauna and flora that originally existed in that ecosystem are important.

 

[qwert65]

I agree Diggers though I think Crichton's point was that we worry about things all the time that never seem to be a big deal I think he was just using headlines as examples.

 

[campbell]

He seems to make a lot of statements with out backing it up with much.

But, but, oil has less carbons than wood, so we're on a path to pure hydrogen! Any day now we're going to start drilling and pumping that sweet, sweet hydrogen. Also, science reverses itself, as clearly seen by the dust jackets on books about magnetic healing. While we're at it, somebody tell those climate guys about complexity, because it's not like chaos theory was pioneered by a meteorologist...

Sorry, I won't derail the thread any further.

Anyways, as to the topic, a point I've made before on these threads that bears repeating is that we do in fact have areas with fairly large populations of wolves, and the game has not been decimated. MN has had thousands of wolves for decades. This is not to say there shouldn't be a management plan, but re-introduction is not necessarily the end of elk and deer in the West.

 

[Diggers]

I think Crichton's point was that we worry about things all the time that never seem to be a big deal I think he was just using headlines as examples

Yeah qwert65, I guess that was the point of all that, however he seemed to be using some pretty odd, or even incorrect, examples as "evidence" to try to prove his point.

Also, science reverses itself, as clearly seen by the dust jackets on books about magnetic healing.

LOL That was another very odd example he used. Talk about strangely obscure. HEH!

And what did he say about Native Americans managing the land?

I really don't think they were managing the land as much as just trying not to starve to death. But that’s just my opinion.

we do in fact have areas with fairly large populations of wolves, and the game has not been decimated.

Exactly, every thing in that ecosystem evolved with the wolf.

If the wolf was going to decimate the population it would have already happened long long ago.

Will there be less deer and elk in places where the wolf is reintroduced?

Yes of course, but it’s because the population is artificially high, due to an absence of an apex predator, and now people have become used to those numbers as "normal".

 

[jeepmor]

I don't mind them being in the wild. It does make me carry a sidearm in case a pack gets their eyes on me and mine for a snack, but until their legal to hunt, I wouldn't shoot one unless I had too.

The wild getting back to what it was is fine by me, however, there should be a season on them for management purposes also, and LOP tags for large ranching outfits. It might make the city dwellers understand that the wild should be wild and guns are acceptable when out poking around the puckerbrush.

I know they have tracked a lot of them from Idaho into Oregon's Blue Mountain range over the past few years. More and more seem to finding the Blue's a good home. That is a mountain range with relatively little pressure compared to the Cascades near the Metro and Bend areas.

 

[Harve Curry]

Jeepmor,
Larger ranches get the LOP tags (assuming you mean loss by predators?) and smaller ranches get to bear the loss on their own, nice rule. That does'nt make any sence. There is alot of red tape involved in shooting a problem wolf.
It's a romantic notion to want to have the wolves out there, but our grandparents and great great grandparents got rid of them for a reason.

 

[MDHunter]

Need Hunting Pressure

I don't have time tonight to go back and look all of this up, so forgive me for summarizing some past discussions on this and other forums.

I think part of the issue in the addition of grey wolves to Idaho, Montana, etc is that the Feds misjudged the rate of reproduction of the wolves; the wolves reproduced at a much faster rate than estimated, started causing livestock and other problems, but the ranchers hands were tied in terms of doing something about it. So the Feds (if I characterize this right) led the introduction effort, and when the population grew too fast it seems they just told the states gee, sorry. That's why Idaho and other states have been trying to push for a wolf hunting season for the past few years.

In Alaska, certain parts of the state currently have a moose hunting moratorium, due in large part to high calf kill rates from predation by wolves and bears. The problem has reached the point where aerial killing of wolves is part of the management (this isn't hunting, it's management culling), although the antis and tree huggers are fighting it tooth and nail. In some areas of Alaska, I believe in excess of 70 percent of moose calves don't reach the age of 2.

If you're gonna introduce wolves somewhere, gotta also introduce management actions, such as the one below.


http://www.thehighroad.org/showpost.php?p=3010996&postcount=22

 

[Harve Curry]

I think shooting wolves from an areoplane is good sport and should be required in all pilots license test. It requires alot of skill and coordination. There is no ethical difference between shooting two legged predators with your CCW, then four legged predators from your aeroplane.
But if your planning to use a GE mini gun, or fixed electric gatlings from a high altitude transport, then that would be pushing the envelope and exceeding the scope of aerial sport shooting.

 

[1911NM]

Afraid I don't have much to say on this subject that would be HighRoad. Mostly have heard or experienced very reactionary opinions regarding wolf reintroduction. Growing up on a ranch which had no wolves, but a high coyote, and moderate bear population, we had more loss issues with porcupines than any predator. (calf noses a porky, and cow won't let it suck). While in Montana in '01, a wolf ate a llama up Nine Mile North of Missoula, so Fish and Game (not to say a few locals) killed the whole pack. What Mexican wolves have been released in NM (where I am now) seemed to have more trouble just surviving not only ranchers with twitchy trigger fingers, but just feeding themselves successfully enough to breed and raise any pups. Ok, <rant off> just seems like with the exception of a few ranchers on edges of Yellowstone, people seem to get way more wound up than need be.

 

[Art Eatman]

Crichton was trying to point out that we seek simple answers to complex problems, and "what we all know" ain't necessarily fact. Again, that concept bears directly on such things a reintroduction and/or protection of the wolf.

Sequentially, the NPS mismanagement favored the elk, as did state managment plans. Okay, that meant that elk spread around outside the park and the numbers allowed a lot of hunters to go after a lot of elk. We hunters think that's a neat system.

Bringing in the wolf then reduces the numbers of elk available to hunters. The real problems for residents are the impact of the wolf on ranching, and the correlative impact on hunting guides from fewer elk--ergo fewer hunters. This means money problems for both groups--with some ranchers also being guides.

Crichton is aware of "unintended consequences", just as is John Ross. Again, "complexity".

Art

 

[Harve Curry]

An unarmed man was killed and ate by wolves last year in Canada, near Wallen (spl?) Lake. Eight mother cows were confirmed killed by wolves in Sierra County NM in '06. Small rancher with three children. Also one horse in the corral. Another man in Idaho lost two out of three horses a few years ago, wolves killed them while they were tied to horse trailer. You don't read about that in the news just like we don't read about when a crime is stopped by an armed citizen. Also you don't read that some wolves are hybrids released by animal rights activists trying to help. All we get is news about how guns were used in murders or some twisted story about bad people shooting good wolves. One other fact, each wolf cost close to 1 million tax dollars to reintroduce down here. It's a huge government effort.

 

[eliphalet]

Afraid I don't have much to say on this subject that would be HighRoad.

Me either.
What the public has been told from the initial conception has not been "high road" either. Deception, half truths to out right lies from the beginning to the present.

 

[MDHunter]

Wolves and Humans...

Don't get me wrong - I love seeing a wolf in the wild, but if he gets within 250 yards or so, he might end up having a bad day...

Remember the other thread Cosmoline started here somewhere, about the wolves around Anchorage in December/early January that were having a hard time catching moose (not enough snowfall yet) and had started snatching dogs from people in Anchorage on the hiking trails. Three women joggers were caught out on a trail about a mile from their car, and they had a tough time keeping the wolves away from their dogs and making it back to their cars....if I recall, we converted a couple of antis that day...

Predators have their place in the wild like all species, but they need to be hunted so they maintain a healthy respect for man and so they don't impact the ungulate populations too harshly. And, so they stay away from ranch cattle.

 

[Harve Curry]

Fines for shooting a wolf are $10,000+ plus prison time. You'll be a felon and have no rights. They are harder to reintroduce because we are such a dry high desert. Haven't had any rain to measure since last fall and everything has been brown since. It will be till summer rains. What I'm saying is we don't have the deer or elk numbers like wet greener states do. Water is pumped for cattle and wildlife benefits from that which is good. There is drinking water now where historically water didn't exist. Wolves learn where the easy pickins are, cattle are alot slower then any wildlife. Ever heard of slow elk ?

 

[paintballdude902]

mdhunter-

i understand how u disagree but around here we have alot of smaller deer that really have no competition to thin the heard so we get large out breaks of blue toung and other diseases

i think wolves around here would be good and would thin the population of smaller deer and then maybe we could get some real trophies

plus we have alot of feral cats and stray dogs living off of scraps from hunters and people i think that wolves would help with this and the rabies out break that we get around every 5 years that wipes out our foxs and racoons

 

[MDHunter]

No Prob - Just Be Aware

Hey Paintball,

No prob on disagreeing, a good debate is a healthy thing, gets more info out to all of the parties, helps people make more informed decisions.

I wouldn't mind if a few wolves were in the MD area, AS LONG AS we were allowed to hunt them as varmints. the problems out west that I have read about have occurred because the grey wolves reproduced faster than anticipated...

Predators like bears and wolves have their place in the food chain, AS LONG AS humans are allowed to take OUR place in the food chain, and hunt them in order to maintain their respect/fear of man and keep their numbers manageable!

I like seeing wolves in Alaska, I really like seeing one within 300 yards on occasion...