In my view wolves are too easily blamed for a problem of our creation.
In the way past a natural balance existed where wolves that trespassed to predate on domestics were dispatched. Government chronically wishing to fix things commercialized wolf kill paying bounties resulting in their virtual elimination. With the eventual recognition that eliminating predators wholesale is not necessarily sound, government enacted the Endangered Species Act. Wolves recovered so successfully that they extended their territories to our front stoops precisely because man and his domestics were held feckless from defending themselves. And some wolves lost their wariness of man.
Government ever eager to expand their domain tackled the problem of too many deer allowing harvesting of does which decimated the wolves’ food source. Being opportunists and hungry, they started predating alternate sources as moose and domestics. Again government decided to fix the problem.
Thus was born the wolf bingo fix. This allowed the random killing of wolves for sport in numbers that proved to have little impact on wolf reproductive capacities and had no appreciable effect in rebalancing the wolf to deer populations. Until the brutality of winter starvation naturally re-balances those numbers, alternate food sources will remain in jeopardy.
Clearly wolves have a necessary and valuable place within our environmental food chain. And as all life, they have a natural right to exist. The root problem was and is unduly ESA habituated individual animals or packs and the artificial constraints placed on man’s natural right to self defense. Wolves that reign supreme in the 95 percent we have reserved semiwild for them, should be allowed to do so. Those that casually trespass and threaten inside man’s domain should be eliminated on a special needs permit basis to re-establish wariness for man’s 5 percent slice.
Keeping man and his livestock off the menu must be taught and reaffirmed through nature’s hierarchical template rather than man’s bean counting orchestrations.
Vilnis Neilands
Grand Marais
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