T Inman,
Nobody here has specifically said that, but some of the more virulent anti-wolf people continue to claim the transplants were the "MacKenzie River subspecies," which they say is far more predatory than the "native" Montana (or Idaho or whatever) wolves.
In one of my earlier posts I called the wolf transplants "stupid," for two reasons:
As you have pointed out, wolves are very mobile, and Canadian wolves had already moved south into Montana and Idaho from Canada. (In fact the wolves in my particular part of Montana are probably from the Canadian population, not the transplants, though the spread of both populations is meeting around here.)
The biologists who promoted the Yellowstone reintroduction believed the wolves would primarily eat bison, solving one of the long-running biological/poltical problems in the park. While some wolves did eventually start to kill bison, most killed elk.
Grizzly./brown bear DNA is identical, and in fact grizzly/polar bear DNA is so similar they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring--which has been happening amore in recent years, as the populations of overlap more.
