Wyoming Weekly Wolf News Report Oct 18-29, 2010
Nine Yellowstone Park wolf packs had pups this year: Agate, Black
Tail, Delta, Canyon, 636 group, Lamar, Madison, Molly, Bechler
My other comment is to notice the small number of livestock losses in Wyoming this year.
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is past President of the Western Watersheds Project and the creator of The Wildlife News.
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The Wyoming wolf predation is strikingly small. How they can even justify killing members of a wolf pack due to a killing of one calf seems to me to be a difficult task. However, they don’t seem to realize how ludicrous these “control measures” look to the reader who is comparing the losses with the number of control measures. I think if you held up these statistics to those legislators who will be asked to overturn the re-listing, they should laugh in your face. “You” being wildlife “services.”
Has anyone seriously tried to figure out why the Wyoming wolf population is still increasing yet depredations have been decreasing? This is especially interesting to me considering the Wyoming population has remained under USFWS management while Montana and Idaho both saw significant increases in depredations under state control.
Joe James,
I think the answer why the wolf population grows in Wyoming while livestock losses to wolves do not is because the federal government does a better job than the states.
In Idaho and Montana, the emphasis by state managers was to kill wolves, not minimize livestock losses. In Idaho there was an obvious tendency to treat every cow calf, sheep, or goat lost to wolves as an opportunity for Wildlife Services to kill more wolves, not as a livestock loss that might have been prevented.