BILLINGS, Mont. April 4, 2014 (AP)
A new population tally of gray wolves in the U.S. Northern Rockies shows their continued resilience despite increased hunting, trapping and government-sponsored pack removals.
State and federal agencies said Friday there were a minimum of 1,691 wolves at the end of 2013.
That’s virtually unchanged from the prior year even as state wildlife agencies adopted aggressive tactics to drive down wolf numbers.
Under pressure from livestock and hunting groups, Idaho officials have used helicopters to shoot packs. Montana has eased hunting and trapping rules.
Federal wolf recovery coordinator Mike Jimenez says he expects the population to gradually decline over time in the face of the states’ efforts, but to remain healthy.
A pending proposal would lift protections for wolves across much of the remaining Lower 48 states.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/rockies-gray-wolf-numbers-steady-hunting-23193709
Exposing the Big Game 
These numbers before the hunt of 2023- 2014 I’m sure
I would love to hear the real story not the contrived fish and game folks.
Yep.
Does anyone really believe this?
Their Lying!
Cattle depredation was decreasing before hunting and trapping and is less than 0.002%. Wolves will manage their own populations and do not need to be persecuted by hunters, trappers and state wildlife agencies. The original proposed numbers were way too low and are not based on good science for full recovery and populating their old niches. The “partners” of USFWS were collaborative in political versus scientific management of the species. Wolves belong in the wilderness niches, were there for millions of years and are good for the wildlife ecology, whereas man, well he is not, and neither is man’s war on the species and wildlife in general.
Increasing study of the social effects of human killing of the wolf create undesirable effects.
1. Since these mammals develp skills and preferences through social/environmental learning, the killing/disappearing of role models makes for great difficulty in transmission of useful and what we might call traditional habits. It’s averred with some evidence building that increased attacks on domestics of humans occur as one result. Since domestic animals have long lost their caacity (including THEIR sociocultural learning opportunities), they are unequipped to survive without further increased killing of the wolf. It is thus a vicious cycle, this interacton with the unquestionably most vicious species on Earth: Homo sapiens.
2.One which I have suggested, which I have seen little to no study on, is the genetic pressure toward what is called r-selection. On a relative scale, K-selected organisms live longer and have less offspring, but care more for each offspring. r-selection refers to organisms which produce a lot of short-lived offspring with faster development and less environmental/social development.
While the extreme persecution of the wolf through gun, and later poisons and sophisticated tricks (of which you can read when exploring the history of modern hunting methods. The domestic “harvesting” of glandular scents and recordings of wolf or other calls are two of these. All the boiling of traps and other methods of removing evidence of human presence to wolf senses would have been ridiculously difficult in ancient limited human social networks. The subject is difficult to elaborate in a comment,) has been of relatively short duration, evolution can also occur quickly. Evolution, after all, is a mere change in the frequency of characteristics. It did not take Dmitry Belyaev 30 years of intensive interbreeding to completely change the fox into a domestic; like domestic dogs, they are unsuited to play their part in nature , and would diminish and die out in the wild. The magnificent inquisitive yet warily wise wolf developed over a period 10 times the length of our own species, with a far shorter reproductive period. This means that it is likely that the ecological value of the Gray Wolf is far more firmly established and necessary than this invasive species, us, has ever been anywhere.
3. While our self-interest bias works through individuals, and short-term disagreement and argument over ecological or other values, are misused (financial and thus social loss is at the root of much or most anti-wolf sentiment, even though it is not backed up by true quantitative data: Humans exaggerate loss, both to themselves, and to those with whom they communicate. We are a less-than-admirable species, that engages in what I’ll call here social climbing to cut digression short),we are also in a period of species overbloom. In the recent century, for instance, the most damaging result of this individual/social self-interest outside of the recently discovered climate disruption, has been soil loss. I am sure you are familiar with the cascade of ecological benefits of the Gray Wolf, by now – much has ben written on this in the last decade.
4. The limbic system of reptiles and mammals is the one through which emotions and memory work. I caution humans often that what they believe the root(s) of consciousness do not lie in verbal language. Evaluation and emotion without symbolic language do occur, and do so without social transference of symbols. As a matter of fact, you (and all individuals of species so equipped) do it FAR more quickly and better without the intervention of language, which is an entirely social characteristic. The study of cognition in animals from invertebrates to us, is a new and growing field, and the inaccurate heuristics through which humans evaluate for social evaluation, inhibit more useful environmental learning and response. I have to leave this issue here, as it becomes rather technical. Let suffice that the indigenous peoples of North America had a greater ecological sense, respecting and often recognizing the values of other beings far more sufficiently than does the present culture, which answers most interactions which don’t produce perceived advantage through killing.
Please understand that for these reasons, along with booksful of others, that Mike Jiminez is utterly wrong. Wolf population will NOT remain “healthy”, but will change in unpredictable ways, perhaps giving rise to greater human desire to extinguish this ancient and magnificently essential being.
It is difficult to stop when aroused:
Even rabies is limited and reduced through the presence of ecologically effective numbers of the wolf in its historical habitats. Rabies is largely spread through mesopredators, which are necessarily firmly controlled by the wolf.
There are many more issues of crowd disease and disease emergence involved. Did you know, for instance, that canine parvovirus and canine distemper are crowd diseases brought about by the overproliferation of domestic canids as pets?
Modern human culture controls crowd disease to some extent, but this control is obligate in our species – sine qua few, or sine qua balance would be imposed upon us, you might say.
Our very overproliferation and that of our domestics makes us vulnerable to the same incapacity to exist in nature, and if you believe that this human overbloom will last against natural processes, you may be mistaken.
It is to advantage that we tolerate the wolf, as this tolerance sustains the beautiful balance of nature. Intolerance and the forced domestication of large ungulates, such as desired by hunting groups and other short-term profiteers, clearly leads to changes and events which biologists employed by those interests fail to understand.
I’ve looked at wolf behavior close up. With a background including psychology, such study casts light upon ecologically aberrant human behaviors. This is not a “political” matter, but a matter of what we choose to be and become.
To paraphrase the Ojibwe: What we do to Ma’iingan, the Wolf, we will do to ourselves.
What great posts. It really bothers me to think that we are killing off individual wolves who probably would pass on important knowledge such as avoiding humans and their ever-increasing ownership of former habitat, livestock, how to find food, social skills, how to stay alive, etc., in favor of assembly-line hunting where only numbers count.
It’s much like the elephant culling when older adult males were killed off – the young males had no one to teach them social skills.