The whole "slower, sicker, older animal first" premise is also FALSE. If you been there, you know.
And that is why wolves in America hunted elk into extinction before modern man arrived on the scene...
Sorry, but Lewis & Clark's journals are filled with accounts of hunting and eating elk all across the Great Plains long before reaching the Western Mountains. The'd eat elk in preference to deer, and there were more elk than deer to. Elk were once found clear into the Eastern states. It was farming of the Great Plains that pushed them into the mountains and off the plains. They cohabited with wolves all across their range, along with grizzly bear and other apex predators. Wolves did limit coyotes to what is now the far SW US and NW Mexico by killing them whenever the opportunity came up. However, now that we hunt elk, and deer and grizzly, the system is out of balance. The fix is not to remove man from the picture, but to manage the population of wolves. Hunting is an income producing method to do that. No animal in modern times that is hunted for sport has ever gone extinct. The animal rights nazis and other environmental extremists don't want to help the wolf, or any other animal. If they truly wanted to help, they'd buy hunting licenses. They really want to end hunting and run the country in such a way that our society devolves back to the 14th century. I prefer not to participate in that lunacy.
