Wolf reintroduction causes threat to humans, animals

Letter to the Editor:

In answer to Robert Tebeau asking for someone to please let him know how the reintroduction of wolves could be any problem: I’ll try.

When my folks homesteaded on Arrow Creek in the Missouri Breaks below Fort Benton, I remember my dad and some of the old-timers talking about there not being any deer. They said they hunted prairie chickens with shotguns.

They talked about having to put up barbed-wire holding pens down around the homestead shacks and taking turns sleeping out with the cattle to keep the wolves away. They said between the wolves and the dry years, many gave up.

I also remember them saying the old mother wolves would take the litter out and teach them to bring an animal down when they reached a certain age and size. They called it “hamstringing,” where they attack from behind. Dad said he saw animals with dragging intestines trying to escape.

They talked about bounty hunters and poison in time thinning the population to where they could start a herd. They seemed to all agree that the poison killed a lot of critters that were doing no harm.

Hopefully this will give some insight into what happened in the past. With so many more people and domestic animals, I cannot understand why they are promoting reintroduction when we know what happened years ago.

Robert, you possibly know something I have no heard or read about. It could be the game biologist and other people in charge who have instructors teaching anger management to the new litters—everything I have read in the papers show that we have nothing to worry about. They have everything under control.

Something I know for a fact is that we have school kids struggling to gather lunch money and grizzly bears, wolves and bull trout seem to have priority because all three have a whole lot to do with their parents being out of work.

—Don “Whitey” Wilson, Libby