As usual, SNAP (Dewey) is bang on.
The term "balance" in nature causes misunderstanding. It doesn't mean a static situation, whereby numbers of game animals and predators remain fairly constant. What most often occurs are significant cycles, whereby game numbers increase greatly, followed by gradually increasing predation for a few years until the game population is diminished, resulting eventually in the decline in predators due to the lack of a food source. Then it starts all over again.
The problem, as Dewey and Greydog have pointed out, is that our influence (road-building, forest management, etc.) have exaggerated the cyclic point where game numbers are very low and predator numbers are particularly high, and without further efforts on our part to protect the caribou, the population will likely collapse completely. What the wolf huggers refuse to realize is that an absence of prey won't be particularly healthy for the wolf population either (but then their argument is primarily based on emotion rather than logic).
Before the wolf kill, the thinking of game managers was actually to keep the hunting regulations - particularly for moose - fairly liberal in the areas where mt. caribou were threatened, so that the moose numbers would decrease and the wolves might leave the area for happier hunting grounds. That has to go down as one of the stupider ideas in the history of modern game management, and I'm glad to see that the politicians are slowly changing the minds on that strategy.
Bottom line - first, a considerable number of wolves need to be removed, and second, we need to re-examine how we manage our forests and our game.
