I don't think that this is the place for hatred of any kind Bella.

Just to clear things up, the wolves that were transplanted into Yellowstone and Central Idaho were Grey Wolves, but they were of a different, more aggressive subspecies. Wolves have been good for Yellowstone, I won't dispute that. The reason they are good there is because the benefits of hunting are not present. Hunting is an essential part of the ecosystem, without it WTXWildlifer is right there is an over abundance of elk. Yellowstone's ecosystem is doing better. The only problem is that there is not an over population of elk outside of National Parks. Wolves were needed inside Yellowstone but not outside of it. I live where wolves live, I hunt where wolves hunt, I see the effect that they have. I don't just read about it. The reason that this politician is taking such a hard stance on this issue is probably because he sees how Idaho, Montana and Wyoming were cheated and lied to. Everything was a lie when they were transplanted. That is why people are so wary of the federal government environmentalists when it comes to wildlife. You can only cheat and lie for so long before nobody trusts you. Wolves or hunters are a part of the ecosystem. Without hunters or wolves ecosystems don't function correctly, with both things don't work. Wolves need to be regulated and managed strictly, since the problem is not going away. Utah just wants to protect it's hunting and ranching economy, it is huge there. They didn't sign up for wolves, nobody did in the west.

Buckbull, the latest elk survey counted 63,800 elk in Utah, not 8,000. One of the best elk hunting states when it comes to quality although other states have more elk.

As for wolves, I'm all in favor of an open season. We are the apex predators, not them. I'm not saying to eliminate them off the face of the earth, but I'm fine with selective elimination if that is necessary to protect the elk herds.

I have never felt right about wolf reintroductions in the west, but figured that the people who live in those regions should have the say. The more I learn about the wolves the more I understand why they were eliminated in the first place. Coyotes are bad enough and out of control in many areas.

Wolves are working their way into other states - three times the number needed to sustain themselves in Michigan already. Haven't heard anything positive regarding their impact on deer, elk, pets, and lifestyles. Only positive thing I have heard is that we will be able to hunt them ... someday. Not everyone wants to hunt wolves, and if they do, I think most will get a tag just in case they need it. I'd much rather have the opportunity to put more venison on the table than a wolf fur on the sofa. If states can do anything to keep the wolves out they should do it while they can.

I can't wait until a wolf pack decides to stroll down Michigan Avenue (the Miracle Mile in downtown Chicago) and pick off a couple of designer mutts. This could end up being a fight that none of us really want to be a part of - Feds and State officials enforcing laws against people who are having their lives and livelihoods negatively impacted.

Of course, that said, it's not like there's LOTS of wolves in Ut. If we could off a couple million coyotes that'd be real improvement.

i think it's great people finally figured out the wolves have taken more than their share. I think more states should have a small wolf hunt to control the pop.

I have personally contacted Mr. Christensen. I think this is a one sided viewpoint, "wolves will cause havoc on livestock and wildlife populations!" is what he was told I bet. Those stakeholders with something to loose are concerned about their pocketbooks. However look at Yellowstone, the willows are returning and the habitat is coming back from years of over browsing by elk. I just ask that people take a look at the whole picture and then make a value judgement. It all comes down to what is more important, and society as a whole is ignorant about wildlife and the outdoors. If we want to see wildlife in the coming decades we must raise awareness and educate people about the outdoors. Votes on bills such as this one will be cast mainly by citizens with no knowledge or idea of ecosystem functions. As hunters and naturalists we know how the food web functions and we work to ensure it's proper balance. I encourage each of you to take a kid hunting and spread the love of the outdoors to the people around you. If we all sit back inactive, one day we may no longer have the right to hunt.

wlewisiii - Allen Christensen is Mormon, assuming he is LDS would not be right because only 60% of Utah is LDS. He has only 1 wife, no Mormon has more than 1 spouse. Also the LDS church demands it's members to follow the law, underage marriages do not happen. I have not heard of anyone getting married before the age of 18, and I have been a Mormon most of my life. You must be confusing today's Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) with another religion, common error. I am not trying to preach, I feel the need to defend my religion from lies and haters. I would be happy if people would leave religion out of these conversations and be respectful.

I think you folks that don't live in a wolf impact area should shut your collective pie-holes and let the folks who have to bear the consequences decide the issue.

You "activists" go ahead an join the Obama camp. He is gonna need the help in 2012.

Have a bounty on the wolves like our grandas did. They got rid of them for a reason!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As far as the whole 'Canadian wolf' thing goes, according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies_of_Canis_lupus) "Wolves of the central and northern chains of the Rocky Mountains and coastal ranges are more formidable animals than the more southern plains wolves, and resemble Russian and Scandinavian wolves in size and proportions.[8]"

The phrase "more southern plains wolves" refer to wolves from Texas and Mexico. So it seems that the wolves used for reintroduction are the same as what used to occur in the area.

Once more I urge all the rabid anti wolf people out there to read Aldo Leopold's 'Thinking like a mountain' essay. And no, Aldo Leopold wasn't some 'PETA freak', google his name and find out for yourself what he was about.

Nice, babs.

About a decade ago, in the northern Detroit suburbs, two wolves strolled though a crowd of several thousand people, tailing a poodle. It was quite the sight. I was there. There's pictures somewhere and they were positively identified as wolves by a biologist so I wasn't seeing things. I hope they were just someone's "pets" that got loose. But if wolves that have no fear of man get pushed into or lost in a big city things could get interesting.

Many insurance polices don't cover animal damage to property so the insurance companies aren't really concerned. Shop owners, therefore, should be since damages come out of their own pockets.

If Aldo Leopold were alive today, do you think he might have concerns about wolves being introduced or allowed to spread into populated areas?

As to wolves, I don't have a problem with eliminating them. Humans have been altering the landscape with respect to competition from predators, in North America, for about 13,000 years. I see no reason to stop now.

I looked him up.

Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) was an American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which sold over a million copies. Influential in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness conservation, his ethics of nature and wildlife preservation had a profound impact on the left wing of the environmental movement, with his biocentric or holistic ethics regarding land. He emphasized biodiversity and ecology and was a founder of the science of wildlife management.[1]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Life and work
* 2 Ideas
* 3 Nature writing
o 3.1 A Sand County Almanac
o 3.2 Conservation
* 4 See also
* 5 Notes
* 6 References
o 6.1 Primary sources
* 7 External links

[edit] Life and work

In 1909, Leopold, a recent graduate of the Yale Forest School, was assigned to the Forest Service's District 3 in the Arizona and New Mexico territories. He was first a forest assistant at the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory. In 1911, he was transferred to the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. Leopold's career, which kept him in New Mexico until 1924, included developing the first comprehensive management plan for the Grand Canyon, writing the Forest Service's first game and fish handbook, and proposing Gila Wilderness Area, the first national wilderness area in the Forest Service system.[2]

In 1933 he was appointed Professor of Game Management in the Agricultural Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the first such professorship of wildlife management.

He purchased eighty acres in the sand country of central Wisconsin. The once-forested region had been logged, swept by repeated fires, overgrazed by dairy cows, and left barren. There he put his theories to work in the field, and eventually authored his best-selling A Sand County Almanac (1949), which he finished just before his death. He lived in a modest two-story home close to the campus with his wife and children. One of his sons, Luna, went on to become a noted hydrologist and geology professor at UC Berkeley. Another son, A. Starker Leopold, was a noted wildlife biologist and also a professor at UC Berkeley.[3] A third son, A. Carl Leopold, became a noted plant physiologist[4] and he taught at the university until his death. Today, Leopold's home is an official landmark of the city of Madison.
[edit] Ideas

Early on Leopold was assigned to hunt and kill bears, wolves, and mountain lions in New Mexico. Local ranchers hated these predators because of livestock losses. However, Leopold came to respect the animals. He developed an ecological ethic that replaced the earlier "colonial Judeo-Christian wilderness ethic." Rethinking the importance of predators in the balance of nature resulted in the return of bears and mountain lions to New Mexico wilderness areas.[5]

By the early 1920s, Leopold had concluded that a particular kind of preservation should be embraced in the national forests of the American West. He was prompted to this by the rampant building of roads to accommodate the "proliferation of the automobile" and the related increasingly heavy recreational demands placed on public lands. He was the first to employ the term wilderness to describe such preservation. Over the next two decades he added ethical and scientific rationales to his defense of the wilderness concept. In one essay, he rhetorically asked "Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" Leopold saw a progress of ethical sensitivity from interpersonal relationships to relationships to society as a whole to relationships with the land, leading to a steady diminution of actions based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold thus rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt.[6]

By the 1930s Leopold was the nation's foremost expert on wildlife management. He advocated the scientific management of wildlife habitats by both public and private landholders rather than a reliance on game refuges, hunting laws, and other methods intended to protect specific species of desired game. Leopold viewed view wildlife management as a technique for restoring and maintaining diversity in the environment rather than primarily as a means of producing a shootable surplus.[7]

The concept of "wilderness" also took on a new meaning; he no longer saw it as a hunting or recreational ground but as an arena for a healthy biotic community, including wolves and mountain lions. in 1935 he helped found the Wilderness Society, dedicated to expanding and protecting the nation's wilderness areas. He regarded the society as "one of the focal points of a new attitude—an intelligent humility toward man's place in nature."[8]
[edit] Nature writing

His nature writing is notable for its simple directness. His portrayals of various natural environments through which he had moved, or had known for many years, displayed impressive intimacy with what exists and happens in nature. Leopold offered frank criticism of the harm he believed was frequently done to natural systems (such as land) out of a sense of a culture or society's sovereign ownership over the land base – eclipsing any sense of a community of life to which humans belong. He felt the security and prosperity resulting from "mechanization" now gives people the time to reflect on the preciousness of nature and to learn more about what happens there. However, he also writes "Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought to cut the farmer's chains, but whether it really does is debatable."[9]
[edit] A Sand County Almanac

The book was published in 1949, shortly after Leopold's death. One of the well-known quotes from the book which clarifies his land ethic is

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (p.240)

The concept of a trophic cascade is put forth in the chapter "Thinking Like a Mountain", wherein Leopold realizes that killing a predator wolf carries serious implications for the rest of the ecosystem.[10]

In January of 1995 I helped carry the first grey wolf into Yellowstone, where they had been eradicated by federal predator control policy only six decades earlier. Looking through the crates into her eyes, I reflected on how Aldo Leopold once took part in that policy, then eloquently challenged it. By illuminating for us how wolves play a critical role in the whole of creation, he expressed the ethic and the laws which would reintroduce them nearly a half-century after his death.

– Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior[11]

[edit] Conservation

In "The Land Ethic", a chapter of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold delves into conservation in "The Ecological Conscience" section. He wrote: "Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land." According to him, curriculum-content guidelines in the late 1940s, when he wrote boiled down to: "obey the law, vote right, join some organizations and practice what conservation is profitable on your own land; the government will do the rest."(p.243-244)

Wolves have had a devasting effect on elk herds where they have been introduced. Wolves don't just prey on the weak and sick; they will prey on any elk that gives this the opportunity. Wolves are not needed to control populations of Elk or mule deer. There is plenty of hunters available to manage this resource successfully. Look at the draw odds for Utah. Some guys have 15 years worth of preference points. Utah has an estimated elk herd of only 8,000 head and has fewer than most western states and even Kentucky. Wolves WILL have a negative impact on the Utah elk/deer herds; no question.

Kill them all. All the do is kill animal population. If a elk herd is getting over populated issue hunters more licences.

WAM +1 ! Mike Deihl ditto.