Wolves were here first

To the editor,

Some armchair biologists at anti-wolf hearings and protests are demanding wolf extermination. They say that wolves kill for sport, and are wasteful. But humans can hardly claim the moral high ground here. Some hunters kill animals solely for their heads or hides. Others don’t eat the animals they kill and donate them to food banks. It seems to me that a subsistence hunter like a wolf is more admirable and deserving than a recreational hunter who kills mostly to feed his ego.

The notion that wolves waste meat is also hypocritical. Wolves can’t afford to waste meat and do a better job of game utilization than we do; examine a wolf-killed moose and you’ll see that everything is eaten but the skull and longbones, and they are licked clean. On the other hand, you can routinely find partially butchered and even some whole carcasses thrown into dumpsters at the county refuses sites during hunting season. Evidently, the dogma among wolf-haters is that the highest use of any game animal is to be killed by a human, even if most of it winds up feeding gulls at the landfill, but an animal is “wasted” if it’s killed and eaten by a wolf.

I’ve hunted for nearly 50 years. The men who mentored me had a conservative ethic that grew from their interest in the natural world. They valued every species, not just the ones they hunted. Compared to them, many of today’s hunters are nothing more than spoiled consumers whose sole interest is killing more game with less effort. Unfortunately, they must get most of the media coverage, at the risk of stereotyping all hunters. Some hunters like me would rather share the woods with wolves, and hunt harder, than be associated with theses chronic complainers.

North American wolves coexisted with their prey for thousands of years, but it only took European settlers two centuries to hunt deer, elk, pronghorns and bison to near extinction. Most of these species recovered, thanks to habitat preservation and predator control (in the form of hunting restrictions). The predators in question were hide hunters, market hunters and homesteaders. Now wolves need protection from the exterminators. They, along with human hunters, should be managed to limit their impact of big game herds. But they should be managed to ensure viable populations, not eliminated.

Bob Love

Columbia Falls