Back on April twelfth, I posted a sort of book report about Cat Urbigkit’s Yellowstone Wolves book and its eye-opening take on the 1990s wolf introduction from a Wyoming rancher’s point of view.
The item that brought me up short in a new report was this: “The study also proved beyond a doubt that wolves now living in the Northern Rockies did not somehow contaminate a remnant native wolf population.” —and— “The wolves from Canada were coming here by themselves. . . . They were already here. They walked.”
This clearly contradicts Urbigkit’s contention that the Canadian wolves brought in to the three contiguous mountain states were a different and larger species from what was here before. This news does not reduce my sympathy for ranchers who lose livestock to wolf predation, but it is another factor that justifies bringing in wolves to establish ecological balance, especially in Yellowstone Park.
The study appeared in the October [2010] issue of Molecular Ecology and was reported in some detail in the October 25th Missoulian newspaper.