LAST UPDATED: May 8th, 2015
Imagine living in an area where you were afraid to let your kids play outside because if they did, they could be attacked by a wild beast. Imagine living in a place where most wildlife had disappeared as a result of the savage beast. Imagine living in a country where the savage beast was a distant memory, only to have it reintroduced by people with a personal agenda that included eliminating most wildlife that we all cherish. Imagine living in a country where the country financed the reintroduction of the beast. The scariest part of this horror story is the fact that it is true. The beast is the wolf. The people who reintroduced them to the West are the animal rights groups. The country that financed it is the U.S.A. This horror story is a nightmare that many people are waking up to daily in the western United States.
Do you think it would have been better for this bull to have met his fate by a hunters arrow?
Scott Rockholm, President of Save Western Wildlife is at the center of the storm. Rockholm lives in rural Idaho with his wife and daughters. He is a diehard hunter. “Wolves are almost everywhere in this state. There are so many of them where I live that seeing elk is getting more and more rare. I won’t let my kids ride their bikes up and down the driveway in fear of a wolf attacking them. I saw one yesterday walking out to my truck in the morning,” Rockholm said.
The American public has been led to believe that wolves are a good thing, that reintroducing them is a good thing and that they only kill the sick and weak when they hunt. According to Rockholm, that is not the case at all. “The wolves were reintroduced here by anti-hunting groups with an agenda to decimate big game animal populations so they could no longer be hunted. That is happening. Places where you used to see thousands of elk are now a biological wasteland where there are almost no game animals because the wolves have killed off everything,” Rockholm noted.
Wolves have been heavily studied in Yellowstone Park. “Yellowstone has the most regulated and watched pack of wolves in the world. The biologists there have watched as 20,000 elk were basically fed to the wolves. Today, only a fraction of the elk that were once in Yellowstone remain and the wolves are to blame. Wolves are like a cancer. Once they are brought into an area, they will spread and kill almost everything in their path,” Rockholm said.
This particular elk never stood a chance against a hungry pack of wolves.
According to Rockholm, places like Yellowstone and Idaho where elk and deer once flourished but are now disappearing is an example of what may be in store for the rest of the country. “It took people fifty years to get rid of wolves by killing every one of them they saw and by aggressively poisoning them,” Rockholm said. “The only way we will keep the numbers in balance now is if we can aggressively hunt them. If we can’t, all big game animals are in danger of being eliminated.” In case you are not familiar with the current wolf problem in the United States, one of the biggest problems with them is the fact that they cannot be hunted in many part of the country. Even in places where they are allowed to be hunted, they have such a strong hold that they are quickly wiping out wildlife because there isn’t a checks and balance system in place. “The wolf problem will slowly become a nationwide problem as wolves move east searching for food.”
