Revised wolf hunt is sensible

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is proposing more liberal regulations for the state’s wolf hunt, and some wolf advocates are sure to roll out the hyperbole.

There will be predictions that wolves will be “eradicated” and “slaughtered” and such, but that won’t be the case. The main change is eliminating quotas for most wolf hunting districts, mainly because those quotas weren’t met despite there being plenty of license-carrying hunters in the woods for several months.

A total of 166 wolves were harvested last season, falling about 25 percent shy of the state’s overall quota of 220 wolves. And even then, the official minimum population count rose by 15 percent in 2011 to at least 653 wolves.

That is 228 more wolves that the state’s current target population of 425 wolves. So even without the quotas, and with a provision that would allow trapping for wolves, it’s unlikely that the next hunt will get the state anywhere near that target number. Moreover, state population models predict that because of new wolves on the landscape, about 377 wolves would need to be harvested just to get the known population below 500.

Some biologists and wildlife managers speculate that the famously cunning creatures will become harder to hunt the more they are pursued by hunters.

Kent Laudon, the state’s Northwest Montana wolf biologist, doesn’t expect trapping to boost the harvest substantially. That’s partly because trapping could be difficult during the proposed season between mid-December and mid-February, a period when packs are highly nomadic in territories that average about 230 square miles.

We’ve pointed out before that Canadian provinces have had very liberal wolf hunting regulations for decades, without the result of “eradicating” wolf populations.

So Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks should be confident in asserting the state’s management authority. Wolf advocates should know that if the state somehow manages to reach its target wolf population, regulations will be tightened. That’s the way it works with other game species, and that’s the way it should work with wolves.