I prefer to listen to the hunters who have hunted the same area for decades, and know what the elk herds look like. Now those herds are way down in numbers. Nothing new has caused this to happen, except wolves.
I've provided comments for the CO issue, opposing the wolf expansion idea related to your original post.
That said, I would suggest using a pretty heavy filter when relying on elk-wolf information that relates to the Northern Yellowstone Herd. Here are a couple tidbits that will counter what I highlighted and bolded above.
One thing that was "new" was that MT FWP had 2,200 cow tags for that herd, even at the time that article was written. The success rates were off the charts for elk now residing on winter ranges. During the period of big decline, we were killing 2,000+ pregnant cows from that herd, which in effect was 2,500+ elk if you could expect a 25% calf recruitment rate. We did that for years.
The outfitter quoted in the comment you posted, Bill Hoppe, was one who screamed the loudest when FWP finally started reducing cow tags in that herd. He wanted to keep outfitting hunters to shoot these pregnant cows, but blamed it all on wolves.
The legislator quoted in that article, Joe Balyeat, also was a big sponsor for HB 42, a bill that forced MT FWP to reduced elk numbers to objective, no matter what. As such, if every wolf in MT died of disease 10 years ago, we would not be allowed to increase elk numbers in units at or over objective, thanks to the bill Balyeat helped get passed.
Those are actions that some will not tell as the rest of the story explaining some contributing factors to the decline of the Northern Yellowstone Herd. I provide them here, so you can see it was much more than wolves that hammered that herd to where it is now.
Yes, wolves do have a big impact. Shooting thousands of pregnant cow elk on their winter range for years on end will have a much bigger impact.
Back to your original post, I hope all of you will write CPW and ask them to adopt alternative #2.
We thought the same thing, we would just hunt them and then the tree huggers keep trying to pull the rug out from under us...3000-4000 wolves is just not enough they say even though the number was to be 1500 to be off the list. For sure don't let them bring "extra" in to establish themselves. Good luck !
it will be a hoot after license sales drop due to lower elk populations
