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I suspect deer are killed more quickly than elk or moose. I watched an 8mm film of wolves eating the top rear quarters of a bull moose as it was struggling on through 5' of snow, while the wolves danced all around it. The moose lasted for over 1/2 hour and was eaten down to the hip bones and spine up through the loins before it finally secumed. The snow was deep enough, although crusted on top, to support the moose in an almost standing position. Yeah -Nature is not kind to animals.

In a pristine 'idealistic world', there are peaks and valleys in game populations. With game peaks, the predetor numbers rapidly increase due to an abundance of food. Soon, they eat themselves out of house and home and move off to greener pastures. The ungulates in that area are now at a valley in population - minimal #'s for survival and start on the road to recovering their population numbers. As the wolves move around the country decimating the ungulates, game populations are systematically reduced throughout a huge area and finally the wolves themselves secum to starvation down to minimal surviving numbers - aka alpha male and females in packs. The game #'s increase fast now and the wolve populations are controlled by the internal hierarchy of only allowing the alpha bitch and male to mate as she controls the other females into not entering estrus - an interesting situation in nature. The pack grows slowly while the ungulates, due to high food sources for them, repopulate more rapidly. With minimal predation and 2 calves or fawns living to maturity for every cow or doe - up go their numbers. Their populations blossum to a high, then it's the wolves turn again - up and down, up and down, the wolf and ungulate populations go - that's nature.

Enter man - Man supplies the high wolf population #'s with cattle to mantain their numbers and the ungulates never do recover over vast areas until Man comes to his senses and does a full-scale assault on the wolves. The wolf is smart, and retreats way back into the wilderness to feed on the burgeoning ungluate populations that have grown in the meantime where man doesn't tread, and thus takes a long time to overcome his fear of man, before hunger again forces him into conflict after the wolf decimates the 'wildnerness' game populations. Due to man being there, the wolf populations never do attain the bare minimum needed for 'nature' to take it's course.

These BC and Alaskan wolves are not 80 pound 'brush' wolves or merely large coyotes. An 8 month old pup will weigh 80 pounds. They are slaughterers of game and livestock and when heavily populated, run in packs of way over 20 individuals. At a conservative average weight of 130 pounds(male and female), 20 animals is 2,600 pounds of hungry carvivour with the cunning a fox only wished he had. There are no animals here can fight a big pack. Even a 1,000 pound grizzly will move off a kill for them.

So - if you see one, put a bullet into it him and it doesn't matter where, as the others will kill it quickly - faster than nature would have, if that bothers you. It's going to be a matter of survival for the rancher and that situation is currently in it's infancy.

I'm not a biologist so I don't know any of this as fact, other than from living 'amongst' them for 30 years and attending a few seminars to learn some of their 'pack' idiosyncrasies. They've been spoiling our hunt for too many years now and some of the 'guys' are starting to fight back - ie: trap sets as explained in a previous post.

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Daryl

"a gun without hammers is like a Spaniel without ears" King George V

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