Don Laubach

Some thoughts from the inventor of the first cow elk call. Thanks to viewing a video produced by an old friend of the show, Scott Rockholm, I ran across a fascinating guy who made history. Listen to the words from Don Laubach of Gardiner, MT, a main entrance to Yellowstone National Park. "Came up here in 1965, did outfitting for elk and bighorn sheep. In 1985, I invented the first cow elk call that ever came out any United States. Won world championships in bugling and calling elk and I became an avid student of elk. Through that I was able to not only understand their communication system but also where they were at and what they were doing. I produced a DVD of when the big migration took place. It was like the Serengeti. We had between 20,000 and 25,000 head of elk at that time. They became the food source for the people of Montana. People could come up here and hunt and they would always get an elk for their freezer. But when the wolves got planted back into here in 1995 we've seen a steady decrease in the elk with recent numbers being below 5000. So you take an elk herd that had an average of 17,000 and now were down below 5000.

The web site saveelk.com reports that an official U.S. Government Study says that the average wolf kills 3 elk per month. Do the math.