The gray wolf prefers to eat fleet ungulates—elk, deer—but when Europeans arrived in America with livestock its menu expanded. A wolf that cannot find its favored meal may turn to cattle and sheep. Livestock producers and big-game hunters have considered wolves an existential threat since Colonial days.


When I met him, on Halloween weekend in Coeur d’Alene, a lake town in the panhandle, he told me that he’d made his most recent kill during the summer. “I went out in the dark and sat and listened over this large valley,” he said. After hearing wolves howl all night, he set up where he thought they’d be in the morning. Using an electronic call—also legal—he played the sound of a young elk in distress. A wolf appeared. “Bang!,” Roman told me. The first sportsman to receive a check from F4WM for a dead wolf, he is now the organization’s president.


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/killing-wolves-to-own-the-libs-idaho?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email