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Right on, Daryl.

"Balance" in nature is caused by human intervention.

There is no such thing as "balance" with wolves. It is feast or famine.

With the aid of the Pittman Robertson Act dollars, US gun owners and hunters have built amazing supplies of ungulates all over the country, and even here in the West where the country was subject to terrible peaks and valleys before the advent of modern management.

Now, with the wolf back in the picture, we are headed for the same famine unless those numbers are sharply reduced. It is a catastrophe.

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9,3 - I hear what you are saying and know you have very good reasons for not liking wolves, but is this really true? I don’t think so, or at least it is a distortion of the truth. There is a balance which is determined by habitat and food supply. If that were not the case, then either wolves or elk would have become extinct in the past, long before increased human pressure. In the past, wolf numbers were kept in check by the carrying capacity of the land (i.e. the number of food species that could live sustainably). However, the area of land covered the whole continent!

Daryl citing the experience of Spatzizi park in Northern BC park does illustrate a point, but not the one that perhaps he thinks. If wolves had been prevented from leaving the park (a totally impractical and hypothetical proposition no doubt) then wolf numbers would have died back to a sustainable level in balance with a sustainable level of elk numbers, assuming of course that the habitat is sufficient in size and carrying capacity to support a sustainable population of both species – chances are that an individual park would not be, particularly as prey species have summer and winter ranges.

With increased human population and competing land uses, that carrying capacity is reduced. However, ultimately the number of wolves is still determined by the availability of food - whether it be elk or cattle (and the carrying capacity for domestic cattle is far higher than for elk because of intensive management). The wolf population is no doubt expanding rapidly, but if the space and food source declines, then so will the wolf population. However, what you have is a government that is conducting an ecological experiment on a continent-wide scale. Unfortunately, in designing the experiment, they have failed to take into consideration the competing land uses - for instance they have failed to take into account that the availability of cattle and sheep will support an artificially higher wolf population than otherwise would be the case if wild species were the only food source.

To sum up, human intervention causes imbalance (contrary to your statement). There already was a balance, but at an unacceptably low level for some. Now it can be argued that there is imbalance. Nevertheless, I think that an equilibrium of wolf numbers will be found, but at what cost?

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