The Endangered Wolf is completely treated in the section on the Illusion of the Endangered Wolf. It is this misinformation that is at the heart of the wolf problems we have everywhere in the US and especially in WI, MN and MI. To have meaningful wolf management in these states it must be understood that wolves are not an endangered species and never were. This will remove all USFWS involvement in the wolf management of these states. That is the key to the common sense wolf managing that can follow.

Surprisingly some leading publications are still making this claim that there is no documented proof that a wolf attacked a person in North America. The WDNR was making this claim at the 1986 Wolf Plan Meetings in spite of the fact that the 1982 Aug and Oct Outdoor Life carried stories of wolves attacking a person.

The July 1997 Reader’s Digest carried a story of a camper being attacked and being badly bitten in a Canadian park. It took many stitches but the camper recovered. The wolf was killed and not found to not be rabid.

This past July a child was attacked by a wolf in Alaska. The wolf tried to carry the boy off but was driven away. Later when the wolf returned it was shot. It was also found to not be rabid. This story was carried in the Wisconsin Outdoor News this past summer. A more complete story of this incident .can be found on Yahoo or the Internet Explorer by just keying up Alaskan Wolf Attack

On April 18, 1996 Tricia Wyman, a 24 year old wolf researcher, was killed and partly eaten by a pack of wolves in Canada. The wolves had to all be killed before Wyman’s body could be recovered. The source for this story is Out of Doors, June 1996. Surprisingly NBC News had a feature on some captive wolves and made the claim that in spite of people killing thousands of wolves, wolves have not killed anybody. This was only a month after the Wyman story made the news. A complete account of this incident can be found on Yahoo by just keying in Canadian Wolf Attack.

On 2/6/96 Dave Montgomery of Battle, Nevada grabbed a 22 semi automatic and investigated a ruckus in his pig pen. A wolf attacked him and was stopped after a volley of several shots. Source---June 1996 NRA Rifleman.

During the 1960s Outdoor Life had a "This Happened to Me" about an ice fisherman that was on a lake when some aerial gunners put down a wolf. He went up to the wolf and it got up and made a lunge for his throat. Lucky for him he had his ice chisel along. He stopped the wolf with the chisel as the wolf was speared and he was able to finish him off. So much for wolves being afraid of people and only wanting to avoid them

In the early 90s Outdoor Life carried a story about a Siberian village that was surrounded by a pack of wolves. If any of the inhabitants went outside the wolves killedand ate them. With the Russian gun control nobody had a means to deal with the wolves. Finally the Russian army came and killed all of the wolves and put an end to that situation.

Sometime ago NBC News had a segment on wolves killing over a hundred people in India. People there do not have shelters with walls sufficient to allow heating to contend with cold weather. So these wolves were able to break into these shelters and carry off children This still continues to be a problem with the wolves in India.

A summer issue of the Wisconsin Outdoor News carried a story of wolves chasing a deer that escaped by crawling under a logger’s skidder. These collared wolves ignored the loggers and went after the deer. Finally the loggers succeeded in driving off the wolves. Once again so much for wolves being deathly afraid of people.

If you have read Dick Thiele’s book on Wisconsin Wolves you remember the account of a trapper that was trying to get to his shelter with some wolves nipping at him from behind. He was lucky enough to get into the shack and shut the door behind himself and escape the wolf attack badly bitten.

In the book "Of Men and Wolves" in the first couple of pages it says that Indians and Eskimos know that wolves do kill people. Of course they also believe that some of their ancestors do return to earth as wolves. That is their version of heaven. So they do not want to talk about wolves killing people.

From all of this one can conclude that it is only a matter of time until a wolf does actually kill a person in the wild. The wolf promoters probably already have their denial and justification stories prepared.

In places such as Wisconsin where there is no real prime wilderness less predators are needed. Hunters can control the number of animals such as deer. From the number of people involved in deer hunting and the economical impact it has one has to conclude that deer are of far greater value than wolves. So deer are rightly valued ahead of wolves.

Carrying this all further, the food on our tables, clothes on our backs and roofs over our heads are because we favor certain plants and animals over those nature provides. When there is a choice in not having wolves, or a well controlled number, as will come when it is understood that they are not an endangered species, it will be possible to conclude that it does benefit the huge majority if there are not any wolves in places where they conflict with human activities.

Those that are experienced with wolves in the wild know that wolves take many of the healthiest deer. When the snow conditions favor wolves this is especially true. Many times wolves kill deer and do not feed on them. In Dr. Mech’s book on wolves , 2 out of 3 studies show wolves do take the same cross section of the deer population that road kills do.

While it is true that wolves do reduce the number of deer, they cause many other problems. There is predation on livestock and dogs. Hunters hunting with dogs are limited in where they hunt. Wolves make deer fewer and much harder to hunt. A far better answer to too many deer is the T Zone deer hunts that the DNR sets up. If there are still too many deer in some specific places it is possible to remove them with DNR shooting permits.

But what happens if there are clearly too many wolves and some need to be removed? Somehow this is viewed differently than removing excess deer. The main cause of this thinking is the USFWS and the DNR bureaucrats. To them the more wolves there are and the problems that they cause, the more of them it will take to justify the situation. They play the endangered wolf to the limit. Just look at what is going on in Minnesota. The legislature passed a wolf bill that allows farmers in the southern half of the state to kill wolves that are doing damage on their property. But the wolf supporters filed a lawsuit against this bill. The media is supportive of this suit calling such killing of wolves as murder. The dictionary defines murder as one human killing another.

This situation was repeated in Alaska when too many wolves were interfering with native and aboriginal harvest of moose and caribou. Removing these wolves met with the same media supported protests. NBC TV showed a wolf in a snare and this was supposed to be viewed as being inhumane. They could have shown a pack of wolves feeding on a live caribou and ripping out it's intestines as the animal was struggling. Somehow this is not viewed as inhumane.

The many Wisconsin deer are a valuable asset. In 1999 the 690,068 gun licenses and 252,432 archery licenses brought in $18,850.000. Hunter's choice permits brought in $938,682 and bonus permits brought in $8.100,324. Adding up all of this we get $27,889,006. Some of these licenses were nonresidential , so the total would be more if that was considered. It should also be pointed out that 4,125 deer were killed in the state deer damage kill for which about $3,000,000 was spent. Compared to the total taken from the deer hunting licenses, this is not very much.

In addition to these numbers there are the amounts that the economy takes in from the deer hunt in amounts spent on hunting equipment, transportation , lodging and meat processing. Some schools and businesses shut down for the deer hunting season. There are not many other activities that benefit and impact Wisconsin people as deer hunting does.

Any questioning of this wolf lover’s premise is immediately called wolf hating or loathing. There is a total wolf favoring media bias that does support this premise. These wolf lovers do not have wolves running the streets past their urban homes and killing their dogs and threatening their children. So at least they agree that there are places that wolves should not be. They cannot see that farmers losing cattle to wolves are not one bit different than wolves killing their dogs near their urban homes. Both should not be happening and will not when the dilemma of the endangered wolf is properly disposed of. Did you see any attempt to deal with protests that took place when wolves were removed where they interfered with native and aboriginal hunters taking moose and caribou for their subsistence? Instead the media supported these protests.

The public has an altogether wrong view of wolves because of what the media continues to dish out. Wild wolves are not at all like those shown in "Dances With Wolves". Now there is a Land Rover commercial showing a dog that looks like a wolf standing in a snowed in road. The Rover driver stops and picks up the dog , puts it in the vehicle and drives off and the public is supposed to conclude that a wolf was saved.

When wolf lovers say "wolves were here first", they think that this wipes out all problems that there are in wolf-people conflicts. People must accept all wolf damage and wolf negatives because "wolves were here first".

If this same logic is applied universally not only to wolves but to all other naturally occurring living things in the environment, we could not have the civilization and life style we all enjoy. No matter where you live, your house and all its electrical appliances, food on your table, clothes on your back, automobile and roads on which you drive it and everything else you take for granted are a result of removing and replacing wolves and all other things that were there first in the environment.

So it is hypocrisy of the highest for urban dwelling environmentalists to give us this "wolves were here first" stuff. They do not have wolves that were here first running the streets and killing their pets and making them worry about their children at play. But people living in what they call "the wild", actually a mix of wooded and cultivated land, should tolerate loss of livestock, hunting opportunities and waste of taxpayer money due to wolves.

Wolf lovers like to say that after all wolves are one of God’s creatures and they are only doing what they were put here to do. Well so are rats and mice God’s creatures. Do we allow them to have a free rein in our buildings and do their thing? We kill and remove them by whatever means we have at our disposal where they are in conflict with our activities. The same reasoning can be applied to wolves that conflict with our activities once it is established that they are not an endangered species.

The time for this first or initial conditions is arbitrary. Wolf lovers do not like going back to the time of Columbus and including all things, not only wolves. This totally destroys their argument. The best choice for this starting time is about 1950 when all the wolves were eliminated from most of the US. So the livestock and the game hunters harvest is really there first. The wolves are really the "Johnny come lately". The wolves that came as a result of being declared endangered and restored by the federal government are not there first whether they migrated or were planted. According to the Endangered Species Act, this restoring was to only be in places where it is practicable. The problems that these restored wolves are causing shows that this is not being followed.

So I hope that we have heard the last of "wolves were here first".

From now, the Wisconsin Wolf Management Plan tries to get you to believe that an average of $81,000 per year will be spent on Wisconsin wolves. To use per year averages to bring this number down is misleading. The fact is that expenditures for 1999 and 2000 were $258,674 and $252,177 respectively. Further much of this is Pitman-Robertson tax money from sale of guns and ammunition that congress intended to be used to replace game taken by hunters. Here it is being used to restore wolves that take game away from hunters.

In Minnesota the people are not told how much. Their wolves are costing them. The MDNR answers requests for this information by saying that they do not keep any record of this. They have to know to the last cent how much State, USDA and USFWS money is going into wolves each year, and it won’t be very long before they are forced to disclose this. The more that write their legislators, the sooner it will be.

If you believe that wolves are really an endangered species, then you will have no trouble believing that the Wisconsin central forest wolves are all there as a result of natural migration.

Myth No 8. Wolves only kill 18 deer a year

Wolf promoters say that a wild wolf only kills 18 deer a year. It may be true that penned up wolves being fed on road killed deer get by on 18 deer a year. But in the wild wolves kill deer as the opportunity is presented. And they do not feed on a lot of these deer as observers often see. Coming onto one of these deer going to waste, and the incredible over $2,000 penalty for poaching a deer makes one question the logic of wolf promotion.

Look at what happened when the wolves got into the large deer farm in 1998. In a short time they did over $100,000 worth of damage, killing deer at a much larger rate than 18 per year per wolf. There could not have been a more specific test of this wolf deer killing theory. There were three wolves involved in this.

Of course Wisconsin law only allowed non-lethal removal of these wolves. So eventually two of these wolves were trapped and hauled off and released. The one remaining wolf got smart and resisted the trapping efforts. So the USFWS finally gave permission to shoot it. Here was an application of Incidental Taking of an Endangered Species which the Endangered Species Act allows There is no other way of looking at this. Incidental Taking can be used to remove problem wolves as it was in this case.

As it turned out, one of the released wolves was mistaken for a coyote and shot as it was trying to get back to the deer farm where it was trapped. The unfortunate shooter tried to cooperate but was fined a considerable amount.

To conclude this 18 deer per wolf per year is just another wolf promoting lie that did not stand up when it was put to a test in the deer farm. Neither does it stand up when snow conditions favor the wolves so that they can make easy kills.

Myth No. 9 Wolves Are Needed as Predators

Even without wolves in the three state area there too many predators such as coyotes, bears, foxes, fishers, racoons, otters and bobcats. There is no predator notch in the ecology that wolves are needed to fill. Coyotes, bears and the winter weather do an adequate job of removing the weaker deer.

It is claimed that wolves do reduce the number of coyotes. Wolves are larger than coyotes and do require more prey and often end up doing more damage than the coyotes they have removed. Wolves do have that special federal protection and are not as easy to remove as coyotes If farmers have any choice in this matter they much prefer dealing with coyotes they can remove than wolves that they cannot do anything about on their own. Wolves keep increasing and expand their range if only the ones that do damage to livestock are removed This removing can only be done by federal agents under present federal wolf policy. In addition wolves interfere with coyote and bear hunting by killing hunter’s dogs. This includes beagles killed by wolves for rabbit hunters that can no longer hunt the places they had been hunting for many years.

These damage payments by the US Department of Agriculture and Defenders of Wildlife are made only after an investigation to determine if it was really wolf damage. Coyote damage is not covered. If animals are missing when there is no snow it is difficult to establish wolf damage. Even if wolf damage is established there is often a long waiting period for the payments to arrive. In Minnesota these payments are limited to $750 per animal. Before 1998 it was $400 per animal.

The damage payments do not cover some of the other problems caused by wolf depredation. Often when wolves kill or chase and threaten cattle they stay near the barn and refuse to go out into the pasture. This is happening to farmers only six miles from Duluth. Once again it is time to say that wolves should not be in places where they conflict with human activities.

For many years , even before wolves were wrongly declared endangered, there has been a glut of wolf promoting propaganda by the media on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. There are hundreds of books on wolf pack lore. But most of this stuff can be shown to be false.

For example , it is claimed that only the alpha pair produce young. But studies show that in the wild 90% of the female wolves produce young when the conditions are favorable. Federally protected wolves cannot find better conditions than they enjoy in the three states.

Not all books are a glorification of wolves. It took a great effort to rid the country of wolves and problems that they posed. "The Last of the Loner" by Sam Young and "The Custer Wolf" by Roger Caras lay out the great depredation damage wolves did and the effort it took to finally eliminate them. Both of these books conclude that there should be places where wolves can be but they do not belong where they conflict with raising livestock or hunting.

"Alaska Wolfman" by Jim Rearden exposes the problem wolves are in a wilderness such as most of Alaska is. They are shown to be wanton killers that kill caribou for the fun of it. They chase caribou running along side and rip out their intestines to put them down and then feeding on them while they are still alive. Wolves interfered with the Eskimo’s attempt at herding caribou which was needed to improve their way of life. Human controlled herding cannot go on with wolves chasing caribou herds long distances.

Wolf depredation is a very serious problem as the annual report on Minnesota Wolf Depredation Report shows. Visit the Minnesota section of this web site for details and also where to get this report.

Most people do not know that the USDA routinely aerial guns coyotes as needed. Those light assault machine guns the armed forces use work real well for this. But because of the false mystique that wolves now enjoy based on the mistaken belief that they are endangered and all of that wolf pack lore people have been reading, any killing of wolves that are causing problems is objected with great outcries. Aerial gunning wolves and coyotes is by far the most efficient method for removing them. This is most obvious when the number of hours it takes to trap a wolf is considered.

To overcome all the misinformation that is so deep rooted out there, it will take a massive public education effort. It has to start with the USFWS and DNR bureaucrats. Of course to these bureaucrats every wolf is very precious. The more wolves there are out there and the more problems they cause, the more work and justification for the existence there is for these bureaucrats. Until the public becomes aware of this situation, and demands changes, things will continue as they are.

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