Wyoming Hunters will be able to take wolves again. October first will start the first wolf hunting season in the Cowboy state since 2013.
Hunters took 43 wolves in the state’s first modern wolf hunt in 2012. Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department cut the next year’s quota. Only 23 wolves were killed then.
The state’s large carnivore biologist Dan Thompson said the upcoming wolf season will be a lot like the 2012-2013 seasons.
He said, “We will use the same data, the same model, the same methodology in order to come up with what we have for hunting quotas.”
The hunt area surrounds the national parks, and extends east as far as Cody, and south as far as Pinedale.
Jay Joachim is president of Wyoming Outdoorsmen.
He said hunting, “It is a necessary tool…to help maintain a balance of predator and prey animals.”
But retired ecologist Chuck Neal has a problem with Wyoming’s plan of allowing wolves to be shot on sight, outside of the hunt areas.
He said the plan allows wolves, “To be treated as vermin, to be killed on sight, anywhere, anyhow, anyway, anytime in over 85% of the state.”