Wolf Controversy

I don't think that I have covered anything more controversial in my agricultural reports or in my outdoors reports than the whole wolf issue. You call Fish and Game officials and ask them about their posture on wolves and they gingerly point you in the direction of a specialist. Elk and deer hunters complained bitterly about declining ungulate populations and point the finger directly at the reintroduction of wolves. However, like every story, there is another side. Suzanne Asha Stone has spent 30 years of her life representing the other side and she talked with me about her position. "We have somewhere around 600 wolves left in the state and there is a lot of pressure about moving that number down. For some reason people think that is a lot of wolves but if you compare that to the number of mountain lions, we have 3000 mountain lions in the state, 20,000 black bears, over 100,000 elk and, what, a quarter of 1 million deer? We have the habitat to sustain large numbers of ungulates as well as predators but we try to maintain higher numbers of those animals if they are going to be hunted. You only want to take from the surplus, you don't want to impact the population itself. All of those animals have an ecological function on the landscape. You want to make sure they are able to perform that, nature working at its best. It seems like in terms of politics in Idaho that our tolerance for wolves is much less than that for other species and part of that is just the political nature of the conflict. I think it has very little to do with reality.