Half of Idaho's wolves gone in a year, thanks to Obama's Sect'y of the Interior

[Rob H.]

63. "Their devastation to live-stock and wild game populations cannot be understated."

This is from an article I found about wolf populations in northwestern Montana (not Idaho, unfortunately) and the numbers re: wolves' threat to livestock don't even come close to supporting your conclusion:

The Truth About Montana Wolves Is Hard To Find
By Christina Nealson / Writers on the Range on Wed, Apr 25, 2012

I spent this winter in northwestern Montana close to the border of Idaho’s Panhandle, a place well known for its dense population of wolves. To hear hunters tell it, I should have seen a deer or elk skeleton every few feet on the forest floor and a lurking wolf behind every tree. Game numbers have plummeted, they claim, as they affix stickers that say “SSS” – which stands for “Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-up” – on pickups, and don baseball caps that urge, “Smoke a Pack a Day.” And they’re not talking about cigarettes.

(snip)

Yet it took three months before I spotted wolf tracks and scat. It was in November, the final week of rifle season. Three months later, I saw my first wolf. Wolf signs did not become common until late-winter mating season, when scat and blood-laced urine appeared twice in one week in the high country along creek drainages.

What I saw on the ground never matched the stories I heard or read about in the newspapers, which blamed wolves for killing off the game. My experience came closer to the claim of Kent Laudon, a wolf biologist with Fish, Wildlife and Parks, who estimates that there’s one wolf for every 39 square miles of game terrain in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ Region One in northwestern Montana. He estimates the average pack size at 6.7 animals.

...Yet the figures show that only 97 cows were killed by wolves in Montana in 2009. During that year, government statistics showed that 2.6 million cattle, including calves, lived in the state; therefore, the percentage of cattle killed by wolves was only 0.004 percent. (emphasis added)

(snip)

By its own admission, Montana’s wildlife agency has oversold doe tags in the past. Laudon confirms that while a few deer herds are down in numbers, other herds are stable or increasing. A predation study is currently under way at the University of Montana. Early reports point to mountain lions, which are three times more numerous than wolves, according to Laudon, as the primary cause of elk calf deaths. Meanwhile, the state uses anecdotal sightings to help it determine wolf counts. (emphasis added)

Maybe I shouldn't point out that bit about mountain lions--wouldn't want to give anyone any ideas about wiping them out, too.