Ted Revelations about Western predators

I learned more about Western predators and predation with retired US Fish and Wildlife biologist Ted Kuch than I could imagine. It started with a revelation about Wolf predation on elk.

I read a news story out of the spokesman review, a newly released Fish and Game study showing cougars eat more elk than wolves. You're kidding. No, but you think about it. Cougars are more widespread. They're more common. Wolves live in relatively low densities. After human killing of wolves, the biggest source of mortality for wolves is other wolves. So they prey on each other. Well, they don't prey on each other. They kill each other. If you intra-specific strife, so they maintain their territories like, here's my family, here's my yard. Don't come in it or you're in trouble. And because of that, wolves occur at lower densities across the landscape. So just again, statistically, you know, if you're into science, it kind of makes sense that cougars might kill more elk than wolves, because there's a lot more cougars out there than there are wolves. I mean, there's several thousand cougars in Idaho. There's 800 wolves. Expanding that, would that be true in Colorado, Washington? I was always under the impression that cougars were sort of endangered. Not true. Oh, my gosh, no.

They were against the ropes. Wolves were wiped out and cougars and bears were nearly wiped out. You know, wolves, all predators. You know, when we moved west, making the west safe for livestock and people we had aggressive predator killing campaigns. Except it was always ironic to me that I work for the agency that 80 years earlier worked with local ranchers to wipe out wolves. And I came back eighty years later and said, hey, new idea, we're gonna bring them back.