credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
If the October headlines were any indication, the quickest way for a wolf to make the news is to get shot. The Jackson Hole News and Guide reported the story of a Wyoming hunter who bagged a wolf, strapped him atop his SUV, and paraded his trophy through Town Square. A Montana landowner shot what he thought was a wolf (it turned out to be a dog hybrid) amid concerns that the beast was harassing house cats. The Ecologist speculated that hunters were chasing wolves from Oregon, where hunting them is illegal, into Idaho, where it’s not, before delivering fatal doses of “lead poisoning.”
Predictably, these cases raise the hackles of animal right advocates and conservationists alike. Both groups typically view hunting wolves as a fundamental threat to a wolf population that, after a history of near extermination, is struggling to survive reintegration into the Northern Rockies. According to Michael Robinson, a conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, “Hunting is now taking a significant toll on wolf populations.”
More:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmcwilliams/2013/11/05/ranchers-insistence-on-cheap-grazing-keeps-wolf-population-in-the-crosshairs/
Exposing the Big Game 
Reblogged this on Wolf Is My Soul.
There are 23,000 permits to graze or farm on public land in 16 western states. There are 772 permits in Montana to graze in national forests. There are 3776 permits in Montana to use BLM land. Add the entitlement of ranchers to the entitlement thinking of hunters and trappers and the march of civilization and wildlife encroachment continues with state and federal wildlife agencies, as they always have, serving primarily ranchers and sportsmen, not the majority of the public nor wilderness or wildlife,
“No matter what the quality of prevailing grazing practices, one thing remains the same as it did a century ago: ranchers have a clear incentive to kill wolves.” This is a statement from the featured article on .grazing and wolves.
This is what many of us have been trying to get across to the groups and individuals who think that just protesting the killing of wolves by “hunters” (many of whom are ranchers, too), is enough. The core problem here is The Livestock Industry, and the agencies like Wild Services that are behind the slaughter. Until we activists tackle the core problem, wolves and other native wild animals will continue to be exterminated. Frankly, the wildlife groups who “work with the ranchers” on “better, non-lethal wolf control” & other “management” schemes, are part of the problem as well.
Thank you, Roger Hewitt, for your great comments. http://www.foranimals.org