The comments here concerning how "logging" keeps "forests" somehow "healthy" are simplistic to the extreme and such nonsense is one aspect of the crisis in environmental management here in BC.
SOME types of timber harvesting, done properly, can and do allow for SOME species of wildlife to increase and others destroy habitat for other species. Perhaps, the best known example is the Mountain Caribou, extirpation in the Kootenay region of BC, one of the legendary hunting venues for big game since the late 19thC. While, the mature Engelmann Spruce-W.White Pine forests existed and relatively few apex predators, largely Wolves, were at minimal pop. levels, the Caribou, were healthy and at huntable pop. levels.
The clear-cutting, mechanized logging, destroyed their major food source, the "Cladonia" that requires these forest types to exist and that began the decline to the current situation, essentially extinction. Certainly, the logging road access contributed to this as the predators could more easily travel on the weather-firmed snow cover along these roads than the prey could/does.
I can describe other such devastating and unacceptable effects of logging in BC, especially the once-fabulous Kootenays, where the finest native trout and wild sheep hunting anywhere once existed, but, this example should suffice.
Can this be rectified and this paradise restored, well, IMHO, with 60+ years of bush experience there, NO, the damage is done and current game populations and fish stocks demonstrate this, IMHO.
I base this on my experiences in the BCFS, BCF&W, various conservation groups in the region and studies at the college there. My family lives there and will have for 125 years next spring and I discussed this with scores of oldtimers as a boy and young man, starting about age 12, 1958.
SOOOOO, we all NEED to reconsider our attitudes concerning logging and other resource harvesting and change our approach to such activities.
While I do agree with some of this, I strongly disagree with your take on the caribou in the Kootenay region. Wolf populations were low because they were managed, primarily by outfitters and trappers. I saw a piece on CBC news where they tried to say snowmobiles were the problem, much in the same way you are saying logging roads are. What they were claiming was that snowmobile trails made it possible for wolves to access areas they couldn't before. Supposedly these were areas where the caribou wintered. These claims are nothing short of absurd, laughable really. Wolves can go anywhere a caribou can, they don't need logging roads or snowmobile trails. They have been doing it for centuries. Any trapper knows this. Ever seen a caribou trail in the winter?? Wolves follow those trails, or make their own. I have seen wolves travel for miles through 4 feet of fresh snow. They travel single file and switch out often. Their trails often look like one animal made it as they step in each others tracks. Trappers call this "trailing". The wolves will use these same trails all winter. They become highways and are great places to make sets. In an average year I will spend 6-9 months out on the land, hunting, trapping. There are zero logging roads up here. Wherever you find ungulates you will find wolves....period. Just about every caribou herd in Canada are in decline ( moose too for that matter) our biologists go out of their way to point their fingers at anything but the real problem....the real problem is quite simply predators. Both bears and wolves. Logging has its problems no doubt, but until more people realize just how bad our predator problem is, nothing will change. Alaska is a great example as to how effective predator control can be.... just look at what they have done with the 40-mile herd.
