So those elk are limited in harvest, right? There's a bull permit, cow permit, etc. The take is highly regulated and in fact, when it was proposed that units north of the Park go to Limited Entry, there was a massive outcry from hunters who didn't want to sacrifice their opportunity, and from outfitters who make their living off of killing park elk. What was the right thing for the elk in that instance?
But yeah, there's some hypocrisy here relative to what's a good buffer zone or low quota area for wolves versus elk. When Montanans were slaughtering elk left & right during the gut hunt, there was never enough opportunity. Then the herd crashed, and so we blamed the woofs for that (without any real evidence) and decided we needed to shoot woofs to help elk. Regardless of that, elk are not endangered in the GYA. Wolves are only 10 years off of being listed, and it took a literal act of congress to get them to a delisted status. I don't think you'll ever see those conditions happen again.
The virtue signaling from the commission on woofs is exactly what some folks want to hear.As a nation that is ruled by law, those actions have equal and opposite reactions. If the elected and unelected leaders spent any time actually discussing the issue with professionals and those with a long history working on this issue rather than catering to the loudest voices in the room, they wouldn't have ignored the actual biologists and adopted rules and regs that make litigation more likely to succeed.
Dislike those anti-hunting groups all you want, but unless they have the counterpart on the right side of this equation to create an opening, they were largely unable to get the kind of changes they wanted.