Montana: Wolf Hunts Are Banned in Area Bordering Yellowstone

[AldoLeopold]

39. I'm not going to jump your ass - people do that to me here all the time

But it looks like you're seriously missing the point in a frantic attempt to defend your post. I want to educate you and I desparately want you to understand.

The ecosystem has its own balance, and we've thrown it off so badly that we have to manage the deer populations (who strip the land anyway that the ranchers would use to feed their cattle) with rifles and hunting licenses. And that really doesn't work very well in the first place. "Wildlife Management is a joke" as my environmental science program head is fond of saying. This isn't the 18th century. There is no real dire economic need whatsoever to hunt these animals - wolves or deer - if we just left the populations to sort it out themselves. As it is, we kill too many wolves, and the r-selected deer breed like mad. If we kill the deer, the wolves starve. If we kill both, we throw the whole thing out of whack.

If we had the kind of human population levels of even 50 years ago or still hunted with bows and arrows, I would say fine, have at it, but these ranchers have quotas to fill and mouths to feed and there are entirely too many mouths to feed right now. They need more and more land, more head of cattle, and now its gotten so they're hunting animals on FEDERALLY PROTECTED LAND or at least those animals that are wandering even slightly off. These ranchers had to have seen the collars on those animals and I think they ought to be fined and sued by the government and by the scientists who were doing the research.

Farmers and ranchers got along fine for thousands of years with wolves as their foe. I can't believe that with our technology that they cannot find a non-lethal way of dealing with these animals. We need to do what the French are doing and simply ban wolf hunting altogether. You'll see things go right then, ecologically speaking.

The fact is, they don't want to and they don't give a flip.