Another Wolf-Related Rant

The Federal government has officially lifted the endangered species ban against hunting and "population control" on gray wolves in the Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes zone-including Wisconsin. The reason for lifting the ban in place since 1974? Wolves have reached a "minimum" population that won't be immediately extinguished by hunting and government-sponsored poisoning.

Not to sound like a hippy (I frequently feed them to my own wolves), but this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. Thirty-plus years to recover an entire species that was nearly wiped off the face of the earth and as soon as the packs meet a minimal threshhold of sustainability, the government sanctions wholesale genocide to appease some farmers in Idaho? True, the wolves may be takin' their jobs by killing an occasional goat, but what the hell are those farmers going to do when they wipe out the only cure to the futuristic wolf flu? If I learned anything from Sylvester Stallone, it's that nature provides the best cure to worldwide epidemics, even if that cure happens to be dandelions. But I digress.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090503/ap_on_re_us/us_wolves_recovered