Area limits …

• Region 1 Vancouver Island and Channel islands - 3 wolves
• Region 2 Lower Mainland - 3 wolves
• Region 3 to 5 - 3 wolves, except multiple areas where there are no bag limits
• Region 6 - 3 wolves
• Region 7A - no bag limit
• Region 7B - 3 wolves
• Region 8 - 3 wolves Source

By using helicopters the kill rate is high (not limited by elevation, snow pack, etc) and the fur is not harvested.

Where does the 3wolves/1000km^2 come from.

From a Freedom of Information (FOI) request sent by the CBC to BC’s Ministry of Water, Land, and Resource Stewardship.

“Documents obtained by CBC News through a freedom of information request provide a glimpse into how the wolf cull has been operating.” Source

Is this in certain areas or nationally surly in cities u would want this number a lot closer to 0wolves/1000km^2.

Wolves live in packs so do not enter cities. Coyotes do, but not wolves.

Attributing this purly to hunting being big business seems a little extreme.

Ok. Please show your data that supports that.

Here’s my data.

• I will amend my assumption that hunting income is a prime reason for the wolf cull as BC does not publish income data specific to the wolf cull (except for costs of the heli cull) here. The primary reasons are that mountain caribou populations are severly impacted by the harvesting of old growth forests. In 2021 logging (in BC) brought in $1.8 billion in stumpage fees (fee paid when timber is harvested from Crown land) (Source) and construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline (which will destroy vital caribou old-growth habitat). Source

• Wolf control, often presented as a ‘solution’ to stabilize caribou populations, ultimately allows continued approval by governments of resource exploitation, including logging in habitats deemed “critical” to caribou. That’s the central message of a new letter in Science, published by Raincoast scientists. Source

• Deep-Snow Mountain caribou are obligately bound to forests old enough to support accessible arboreal hair lichens in quantities sufficient to offset the costs of locomotion and other physiological processes (Antifeau 1987), a habitat requirement incompatible with large-scale clearcut forestry (Stevenson et al. 2001). PDF source

• A government-sponsored wolf kill in Western Canada has had “no detectable effect” on reversing the decline of endangered caribou populations, a study says. Source

• For Van Tighem, the winter cull is a symptom of an ecosystem out of balance, a natural world so disturbed by human activity that we are forced into playing an ecological version of whack a mole (or, in this case, shoot a wolf). All the while, we clear-cut the old-growth forests on which southern mountain caribou depend, seeding their habitat with oil and gas operations and splintering it with roads. Source

• Intensifying resource extraction poses an existential threat to the world’s biodiversity. This threat is exemplified in the case of British Columbia’s (BC) endangered woodland caribou herds (Rangifer tarandus), which are facing extirpation due to extraction-driven habitat destruction, primarily from oil & gas development and forest harvest. Source

• The acceptance of triage (allowing the smallest herds of mountain/woodland caribou to die off) could even provide perverse incentives for this outcome, as exemplified by the disturbingly common frequency with which decisions to approve major industrial projects have used the rationale that caribou habitat in the project area was already degraded or caribou were extirpated (Collard et al., 2020). Source