Wolf Advocate

I have done so many anti-wolf stories on behalf of livestock producers that I thought we could visit with Suzanne Asha Stone from time to time in order to learn more about the philosophy of a person who is an advocate for wolves belonging in the landscape and wilderness of Idaho. "I have been working with wolves for close to 30 years now. I work quite a bit with ranching and hunting communities and just having a good honest debate, exchange of information and listening to each other is just incredibly important. Let me hear your platform in terms of why an interest in wolves? I have always just been fascinated with wildlife. I grew up in a place that was fairly wild and spent a lot of time out catching tadpoles and watching birds. Hunting and fishing and all of those kinds of things. I was particularly interested in some of the major predators in our country. In our landscape we have lost so many of these wild animals that it just seemed to me that we needed to keep all the pieces in place, that having wild predators on the landscape really gave it a depth that didn’t occur when they weren’t there. It became a very homogenized system when you didn’t have the full gamut of native species. I moved from Texas when I was a little girl to Idaho and really got to experience what’s left of some of our most amazing wilderness in our country. Mountain lions and bears and camped out there and hiked in that country and just fell in love with it.