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After a nearly a decade long hiatus Wyoming is finally back on track with seasonal gray wolf hunting kicking off in 2017. After not hunting wolves for so long in the Cowboy State we have a massive overabundance of them roaming the hills and valleys, which is the reason so many of the wolf quotas were filled so quickly this past hunting season. The 2017 wolf season inside the “trophy” zone opened on October 1st statewide. As a result of so many wolves more than half of the area quotas did not even last through the month of October. Of the twelve open wolf areas six of them filled their quotas with only twenty-five days or less of hunting.

I personally had a wolf tag in hunt Area-4 (Meeteetse Area) where the season failed to remain open for even four full days. You are welcome Wyoming Game and Fish for the $20 donation, every little bit helps I guess. I think it fair to say that if a quota is filled in less than four days, we simply have too many wolves. Hunt Area-11 (South Wind Rivers) was even shorter, where four wolves were killed on a three-wolf quota on the first and only day of the season! Newsflash- I think we need higher quotas. And I’m not the only person who thinks this, the Game and Fish as quoted in a local newspaper article, “there’s still a surplus of wolves, well beyond the minimum of 100 wolves and 10 breeding pairs that the state has agreed to.”

As of the end of December the only three wolf seasons still open were Areas 6, 7 and 8 in and around the Jackson Hole valley where the wolves are very difficult to kill mostly due to the tough hunting conditions, remote access and low hunting pressure in the area.

There is some very interesting statistical data nested inside this report as well. More evidence that predator population control and management often boils down to simple math and economics, contrary to popular belief and basic uneducated logic on the subject. The fact remains, wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions will die, we just seem to be fighting over who is going to do the killing and how we are going to pay for it. A simple case in point, in California where cougar hunting has been outlawed for decades, the state of California is now killing more mountain lions than they ever did during an open cougar season so many years ago. And instead of generating revenue from cougar hunting licenses, tags and permits, California is now paying millions of dollars for state sponsored under the radar, politically correct predator control efforts-a financial swing of literally millions of dollars, and not to the favor of the taxpayers or sportsmen of California. When it comes to wolves, Wyoming is not much different.

Here are some stats to back that statement up. In 2016 Wyoming did not have a wolf hunting season but 113 wolves were still removed from the state, killed by wildlife officials through damage control efforts. This cost the state no less than hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not one single wolf tag was sold in Wyoming in 2016, leaving the sportsmen of the state of Wyoming to pick up the tab for the location and removal of the 113 problem wolves.

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