Got this email from Dave up in Gatesville, forwarding it to me from a friend of his.

The email included this comment:

Thank you Bill Clinton and Bruce Babbitt!

This wolf was killed a few miles north of Boise Idaho near the Banks-Lowman Highway. Take a look at the size of this monster and you'll realize how many cattle and sheep (or Elk and Deer) a pack of wolves this size would eat. We now have over 1700 of them (er, 1699 now :) ) in the Montana, Idaho and Wyoming region. We eradicated them first time for a good reason.



It's a big sucker ain't it?



Thing is, I wonder how it was that huge populations of deer and elk and buffalo (something like 20 million buffalo in 1800) coexisted with all those millions of wolves and coyotes for all those millions of years without cattle ranchers, farmers, sheep herders and such flyin' up in their helicopter to save the day?

If they're all left the hell alone the wolves will take out most of the coyotes (eliminating competition), and then take only the slow and lame from the herds. The deer, elk, and buffalo populations thrived in that natural ecosystem before we showed up to throw things off balance. Maybe cows and sheep are too far removed from the wild to adapt to the threat, or maybe ranchers and farmers just don't want to have to adapt. Maybe ranchers who charge thousands of dollars to let hunters come in and take an elk just don't want the competition.

Every time I've driven through our western landscapes, like across western Kansas and Colorado on I-70, or across the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico on I-40, I imagine those herds, and the Indian tribes on the move, and it occurs to me that since we made the West safe for farmers and cattle ranchers 100 years ago, it's seemed awfully empty. There's a huge element missing from the landscape, with only the remnants left behind to remind us. We have to safeguard them, or nothing will be left.

I think they ought to leave the wolves alone, and force the people who want to live on the edges of the wilderness to put up with a few critters here and there. Yea, I'm a tree hugger. I like trees. I like 'em better than I like most people. I never saw a cow that was cooler than a wild wolf ether. Well, maybe a longhorn, but they're almost wild too. Like I said, deer and elk and wolves can take care of themselves. They've been doin' it since the ice age ended. Let 'em alone, damn it!