NitroX - good points - however, in regards to classing them with tigers or lions, we are forgetting the way wolves breed.
: In a single pack, given normal fight for food situation, only the prominent male and female breed. She brow-beats the other females into not coming into heat.
: When food is plenty, they all kick into estrust and the other male and females breed and break off to make their own packs. With no predation against themselves except by man, they have no controls placed upon them, and each female giving birth to 3 ro 6 pups, which breed the next year, makes for a population explosion amongst them.
; With man to help feed them, their numbers don't follow the normal peaks and valleys of population that follows game. Once introduced where man lives, they generaly decimate the game populations, they subsist on livestock while still-yet dwindling the game populations.
; Until there is a huge poinsoning program, their numbers don't take a kicking from normal starve-offs.
; Warm weather in the late winter, then freezing makes for very difficult times for the elk, moose and deer. Being small footed in relation to their weight, they still sink to their bellies in the snow, while the wolves run on top. The bad weather which already weakens the ungulates, coupled with being restricted in movement by snow, the wolves will kill off most of a small herd in one go, when food is plentiful. Under those circumstances, it only takes 1 or 2 wolves to pull down a huge bull or buck, which doesn't have antlers at that time for protection, nay, in the snow, wouldn't be able to protect himself even if he did.
; I don't quite see them as vermin to be eradicated (almost impossible anyway), like most ranchers do, but one should sometime put oneself in their shoes. How would you like to lose your entire income for the following year before you even start working for it (you still have to work that year), just so some bunny hugger in LA or New York can dream of wolves howling in the night in Idaho.