Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Idaho Wolf Management Remains Contentious

The article is written for and by Rancher interests. Not a big deal but take it for the bias that it is. I really don't think the impacts to livestock ended up being as great as the data suggested. If your a livestock producer and you lose one animal I'd guess that's not very comforting.

BTW Rock there's a lot of DNA taken from harvested wolves around Idaho and Montana that tells a story different that the one your going with. Wolf DNA shows that around 60% of the wolves taken did not come from descendants of the reintroduction but rather migrants from Canada. Wolves were coming to us no matter what and the process of reintroduction allowed us to kill wolves and save livestock. Had the reintroduction not happened they would have received full protections under the ESA.

Historical wolves killed in Montana were just as GIANT as they are today.

But the bar-stool biologists love a good conspiracy theory about how the reintroduction wiped out the smaller native wolf. LOL.

I have no doubt that wolves in small numbers wandering in and out of the ID before the reintroduction(there is proof of this)

My BS-meter pegs out though when people claim that the smaller native Idaho wolf was wiped out by the reintroduced wolves. It even gets funnier when they claim that the "native wolf" didn't eat livestock or much big game, and stayed out of trouble by and keeping themselves secluded back in the mountains.

I remember reading the wolves that were “reintroduced “ were the largest of the 5 sub species ( David Mech) from far northern Canada. Mackenzie River wolves. Not just over the border. If we were trying to reintroduce a wolf similar to the native wolf, why didn’t we use wolves from Minnesota? They have about 3,000 timber wolves at any given time that are similar to the “Buffalo” wolf that was in Yellowstone. Sounds like someone just took a lg blk wolf around Joliet Montana. Excess of 150 pounds. Sounds a little big for native wolves.

I’m guessing they wanted a wolf that could take down the growing buffalo numbers too. This has been a cluster from the start if wolves were returning on their own from Canada.

There was a hunter that shot a wolf prior to the reintroduction in 1995 that the feds tried to hang. I remember he got off because there weren’t susposed to be any wolves in the US at that time. Jerry was his name around the Jackson area.

I’ll let you barstool Biologists answer that.

Not a bar stool biologist, but after looking up the Mackenzie River wolf, it states that their original southern range included the northwestern U.S. including Washington,Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Oregan might be in there too. It did state that wolves from the northern area,could be a little larger,but only by a few pounds. Not really much difference. Basically the same wolves. Definitely not the huge vicious wolf of the north that had never been here.

At first, Idaho wolf numbers skyrocketed, peaking at an estimated 856 in 2009 before subsiding to the current 700. In the meantime, the number of wolf depredations of livestock has also stabilized.

Any references for any of that?

Dead wolf, good wolf.

Hurry up and get ur ass over there you can take me aerial gunnin for em Tony

I'm not sure where the idea that Idaho had a smaller subspecies of wolf. The ones "reintroduced" were the same gray wolves that we always had. The same that range from Alaska through Canada and into the northern border states

Idaho always had a few wolves. While elk hunting, I heard wolves howling and saw tracks a couple years before they were reintroduced. This was in central Idaho in unit 34