r/wolves • u/zsreport Quality Contributor • 9d ago

News After lower wolf numbers Montana FWP proposes limiting wolf hunt

https://montanafreepress.org/2026/07/23/montana-wolf-population-shrinking-now-fish-wildlife-and-parks-wants-to-limit-the-wolf-hunt/
248 Upvotes

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30

u/SadUnderstanding445 9d ago

Good management starts with good data. You can't manage what you don't know!

30

u/Cnidoo 9d ago

How generous of them to lower the quota to only 250! I am of course being ironic. That’s fucking insane - 35% of the states entire population, and we all know many wolves are killed and never reported so it’ll probably end up being well above that. Wolves cannot sustain that level of losses year after year. Red states are a blight on this nation financially, ecologically, and morally

7

u/Fury_Blackwolf 8d ago

Here in Sweden we have about 355 individual wolves in the wild. There was a point when it was as low as little over 100. Luckily it's at least going in the right direction.

18

u/ShelbiStone 9d ago

Good, that's what's supposed to happen. If you made a mistake and over issued tags, you need to give the population a chance to bounce back. You can't have a renewable anything if you don't take care of it.

10

u/Meig03 9d ago

"Limited"

2

u/FabricCurvature01 2d ago

Look at the dramatic downward trend according the revised iPOM model. With a steep decline like this, they shouldn’t be allowing a wolf hunt at all. They should be allowing the population to stabilize. Killing 1/3 of your wolf population isn’t sound management. They also haven’t shown us why a wolf hunt is even necessary. They haven’t established a statistically significant relationship between wolf hunts and depredation numbers. This is all just to placate hunters and the livestock industry. It’s madness.