Word: wolfs
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...Montana and Idaho, wolf populations have been kept low by disease, illegal poisonings and lethal encounters with cars. But Yellowstone could be a promised land. The 930,000-hectare (2.3 million-acre) park is surrounded by millions of hectares of wilderness, a panoramic spread of high plateaus, broad river valleys and forests that teem with elk and other wolf food. Abundant grizzly bears keep backpackers to a minimum. Hunters are allowed to move through the wilderness areas adjoining the park only during five weeks each fall, and killing a wolf could bring high fines and imprisonment...
...wolf pack has settled in Yellowstone, it could produce four to six pups annually, some of which could survive to disperse and colonize other parts of the park. "That's the way it happens," says Michael Hedrick, a wildlife biologist who monitored wolf packs on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. "First you get ambiguous sightings, then someone sees a family, and then the % floodgates open...
That possibility is what makes landowners edgy. Says Clifford Hansen, a former Wyoming Governor and Senator whose family grazes cattle in Grand Teton National Park: "I'm old enough to remember when ranchers paid a $150 bounty on the wolf, and in those times they would not pay that kind of money to counter a trivial threat...
...Wolf advocates respond that before the turn of the century, the West had hundreds of thousands of wolves, which began killing livestock only after hunters slaughtered most of the bison, elk and other prey. Yellowstone's superintendent, Robert Barbee, points out that the situation is now dramatically different: the park and surrounding wilderness have more elk and deer than at any time since the white man went west. One conservation group, the Defenders of Wildlife, is so confident that wolves will stick to abundant wild game that it has unveiled a plan to compensate ranchers for losses to wolf attacks...
Renee Askins, executive director of the Wolf Fund advocacy group, sees the issue as a "rare opportunity for people to set right an environmental wrong." At the very least, finding a resolution that protects the wolves while easing fears of the nearby ranchers would be a great step toward showing how Americans can learn to manage their difficult and often ambivalent relationship with wild nature...