This week the paper published my letter in response: Idaho Statesman Letter
I felt that since the people sponsoring these Ads obviously had a lot of money to spend on a misguided mission I needed to do something in response. This is my start on it.
The fundamental problem with wolves and the reason they were removed from Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in the first place is that they have a voracious appetite for Elk. I am an Elk lover. We have a local Elk herd (I'll post some images later) that visits our house. We are happy to feed them our flowers and trees and enjoy watching them. That will soon be gone if the people that planted these voracious predators have their way and wrest control of our outdoors back from the State of Idaho. IMHO they ought to release the wolves in their own back yards...not mine.
EACH WOLF KILLS OVER 20 ELK PER YEAR. The people that want these things to run uncontrolled throughout Idaho, including my back yard but not theirs, seem to have no conception of this FACT. Since wolves live five to ten years in the wild every wolf will kill between 100 and 200 Elk during its lifetime. I think each Elk is worth 20 or more wolves, not the other way around.
To give you a visual, this is about the average number of Elk killed by ONE WOLF EACH YEAR. Multiply that by the five or so years each wolf lives and you begin to get the idea. Not a trade I'm willing to make! (PS: I took this picture in my back yard. It is personal for me.)
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I have been visiting Yellowstone since 1970. We raised our children viewing hundreds of Elk on each visit to the Park. These people have denied our Grandchildren that experience. The last two times I visited Yellowstone (one last week) I saw only three Elk each time, and they were hiding in the trees. As the quote in my letter shows, that herd has been devastated by over 80%. So have the Elk in the Lolo region of Idaho. I believe the devastation to be equally severe wherever the wolves have made homes but haven't yet found the data to support it on other areas.
One of the reasons I prefer Elk over wolves is that they are good to eat. I hunt for them. This last week I found the Elk had been cleared out of my present hunting area by the wolves. The first morning out I heard the wolves yapping and baying all morning. The next morning my son's friend shot a deer and he and my son were set upon by the wolves within 20 minutes whilst cleaning the deer. They managed to keep them at bay. We saw no Elk on this hunt...one where we always saw dozens before.
I had a similar experience hunting Elk in the Sawtooth wilderness a few years ago. All we found were Elk carcasses clearly killed and dismembered by wolves.
Letting wolf packs grow unmanaged is advocated by many if not most wolf advocates. They rest their arguments on the notion that there were many wolves and ungulates living peacefully together before the extinction of the wolves in the lower 48 states in the early 1900s. That perception is wrong. Lewis and Clark described the areas around what is now Yellowstone National Park as having very little wildlife. The best study I can find to date of the first Euoropeans travelling in this area in the 1800s strongly confirms that there were few wolves in Yellowstone...and few large mammals in total. Pre 1900 Study The wolf advocates are chasing an ideal that never existed.
Here's a video that exposes much of the problem:
Crying Wolf
This has got to stop!
Please do what you can to get these Canadian wolves eradicated in Idaho and Yellowstone. They don't belong here.
I used to hunt elk in Idaho near the Montana border north of Idaho Falls for many (25 or so) years. The areas I hunted were 75 to 100 miles west of the center of Yellowstone Park.
ReplyDeleteI gave up hunting about 8 years ago as I would never see the elk population I had seen prior to the wolves being introduced into Yellowstone. I can only say that the wolves are far better hunters that I ever was. My lifetime "score" was 2 elk but I certainly enjoyed being in the mountains each fall and hunting the magnificent animals -- even though they usually evaded me.
I can see no social or environmental benefit that the wolves brought with them. In contrast, devastating the elk population and the predatory effect on domestic animals is a clear negative. The Idaho I lived in prior to the wolves was a better habitat that was not improved by the wolf!