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hey wyoming lost me as an elk hunter when special tags hit almost a grand.

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You have the right to spend your money as you see fit. However there is a catch 22, which boils down to use it or lose it!

The reason prices go up is rising demand for those hunts - which indicates a high value placed on the quality of the experience and implies a game species conservation success in providing the resource to satisfy that demand.

If prices fall, it is because demand has fallen. This can either be because the game management policy has not suceeded and numbers have risen excessively and quality has declined, or becasue numbers and quality have declined. Either way, game species conservation is the loser in terms of reduced revenues. There can also be a negative impact on habitat quality. There is also a social impact on declining natural resource value, which for good or bad can only be measured by the willingness of individuals to pay for it.

If revenues from sightseers who want to see wolves are sufficient to balance the decline in sustainable use revenues (hunting), and the environmental quality of the area does not decline then that is fine (although one should also consider the impact on other land users such as farmers). However, we all know that experience in Kenya does not bear this theory out - declining species populations, declining habitat quality and a huge amount of revenue foregone through not allowing sustainale hunting.

We can complain all we want about the cost of hunting and as individuals it can hit us hard. However, in the long run we a winners because rising value and demand is the only pressure that can result in greater hunting opportunity and increasing availability of land for game species. From this perspective, introducing wolves in uncontained areas which creates a conflict with other sustainable resource uses would appear to be bad policy, planning and management.

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