We may soon have laws protecting the Gray Wolf in New York. These laws will be based on emotion, bad science, and absolute lies. Twenty-five years from now, there will be a bitter struggle between those suffering severe losses and legislators refusing to admit their previous mistakes. That struggle—to change the law, strip the gray wolf of its protections, and drive them back into Canada—will pit rural and suburban New Yorkers against forces outside the state.
But long before that battle, 25 years from now, in the bedroom communities outside of NYC, the 35-pound coyote will have been replaced by an 80-pound wolf. The Ring camera video that once showed a slim coyote leaping over a backyard fence to grab a pug will now feature eight wolves chasing a female jogger into the darkness and an uncertain future.
The gray wolf has nothing to offer New York except destruction and danger. The only way to prevent a future in New York plagued by these large, dangerous predators is for urban and suburban voters to do everything in their power to support their only defenders, the rural coyote hunters of Upstate New York.
A recent history of the wolf in America.
Idaho deliberately reintroduced wolves 25 years ago. Today, Idaho allows hunters to kill up to 90% of the wolf population every year. What changed lawmakers minds? What finally convinced them that tens of millions of dollars spent helping the wolf’s return were a total waste of taxpayer’s dollars?
According to Idaho’s Governor Little, ”Idaho has been responding to wolf depredations for years, and this legislation is an attempt to provide additional tools to address conflicts that negatively impact our wildlife populations and harm Idaho’s agricultural industry—the backbone of our economy.”
Idaho lawmakers told ranchers and other residents who voiced concerns about bringing the wolf back to Idaho that at most 150 wolves would take up residence in the state. By 2021, there were at least 1,500. According to State Senator Mark Harris, a rancher himself, ”These wolves, there’s too many in the state of Idaho now. They’re destroying ranchers. They’re destroying wildlife.”
Letting wolves repopulate Washington has caused major problems.
In Washington State, ranchers no longer trust the lawmakers, biologists, or the Fish and Wildlife department to be truthful in their reporting of damages and attacks by wolves. The state allows the lethal removal of wolves after they have injured or killed a rancher’s livestock three times within the last 30 days or four times within the previous ten months. But ranchers must prove non-lethal methods did not work before they can kill the attacking wolf.
Sadly, many Americans think ranchers are cattle barons with herds stretching out for miles. Ranchers, in reality, are much more likely to be the poor cousins of struggling, debt-ridden farmers a mile down the road. A single loss could have the same consequences for them as the theft of one of your cars.
And it is this failure to understand the plight of rural Americans that could make New Yorkers suffer an untold financial loss before any attempts are made to address the issues created by letting the gray wolf resettle in our state.
One Washington State rancher put his thumb on the problem when he said, “If the wolf population grows in the right political spots, then something will be done. What I’ve seen is that the farther you are away from wolves, the more you like them.”
Colorado reintroduced the gray wolf in 2020.
Within two years, they were becoming a serious problem. In Walden, Colorado, cows and dogs were killed, and the eight gray wolves known as the culprits were using the town as a grocery store.
The response from authorities? Check this line out, ”The predators are necessary for ecological recovery, experts and scientists agree. As they begin to reproduce, they should help plant life — like aspen groves — and other wildlife to recover from a warming and drying climate, overgrazing, and human development.”
Human needs, be damned.
Powerless, local residents have had to change how they live under the threat of constant attack. One resident interviewed used the GPS information on the local wolves to prove they were at his house during different attacks that killed and wounded three of his dogs. ”He said he won’t go out on the ranch without his 40-caliber Glock for protection. Nor will he let his son head to the barn alone anymore, not during the day and especially not at night.”
Here’s hoping he doesn’t have to use his pistol. With the crazies running the judicial system, he could face a $100,000 fine, a year in jail, and loss of hunting privileges for life.
Who would want the gray wolf in New York?
Who wants the gray wolf to take up residence in New York? With all the problems bedroom communities are already having with suburban coyotes that are half their size, who would find any benefit to having them replaced by much larger predators?
The answer is simple, out-of-state pro-wolf groups, anti-hunters, and those who fear guns. In other words, those who will live the furthermost from the threat—and already consider the rural lifestyle problematic. It is perhaps ironic that those who happily confine their German Shepard to a 10-square-foot space every day would dictate laws concerning animal welfare to a rural New Yorker, whose same breed of dog enjoys miles of travel every day.
Ironic and telling. Ironic because the first thing wolves would do is find our New York state whitetail deer population a plentiful food source—for a while. The gray wolf will kill more deer than hunters, but no researcher will dare report such findings.
Telling because, the three groups that will align to insist gray wolves be protected and allowed to infest New York will never admit to their mistakes, nor show any concern for the suffering their purely politically motivated demands incur.
25 years of misery, how we’ll live after we let the gray wolf in New York.
We Americans never learn from history, so New York will soon take action to protect the gray wolf.
The first step will be to allow the gray wolf to ”recolonize” New York. With recent DNA confirmation of a gray wolf shot by a coyote hunter in New York, the next steps taken by the pro-wolf movement are obvious and already being called for in Vermont.
Coyote hunting will be made illegal in New York.
As one Vermont group has already begun suggesting; coyote hunters can’t tell the difference between a coyote and a wolf, so “We urge Fish & Wildlife to stop the open unregulated hunting season on coyotes and make an effort to understand what’s happening in the field and what kind of wild canid we have here in Vermont.”
How fast this happens in New York is hard to say. But, in a single day, the Governor of New York eliminated the ability to carry a legally registered firearm into any building unless a sign was posted allowing concealed carry within.
If it happens in stages, however, the pattern is a bit easier to predict.
- First, the use of thermal sights will be made illegal.
- Second, all electronic sights will get removed from the legal implements list.
- Third, night hunting will be banned.
- Fourth, someone will accidentally kill a wolf during the day, and then all coyote hunting will be prohibited.
And the law of unintended consequences will first be applied directly to the coyote. Sometime during the first winter, the wolves will begin killing them and driving the survivors from the state.
Fines and imprisonment for killing a gray wolf in New York.
Oh, they will have a clause that allows using deadly force to protect yourself. However, it will be your financial burden to prove you had no other alternative, and you’ll take a plea bargain and lose your firearms.
The new law might look like New Mexico’s where it is illegal to:
• Kill or injure a wolf because it is near you or your property.
• Kill or injure a wolf if it attacks your pet.
• Kill or injure a wolf feeding on dead livestock.
• Enter posted closures around release pens, active dens and rendezvous sites.
• Shoot a wolf because of mistakenly identifying it as a coyote or anything else.
Violate any of those, and it’s a $50,000 fine and six months in jail.
The gray wolf will begin killing off New York’s whitetail population and tax revenue.
The gray wolf will be the new, New York state apex, predator. Its former apex predator, the coyote, consumed less than 3 pounds of food a day. The gray wolf eats as much as 20 pounds.
The coyote was never much more than a member of a small family unit and often hunted alone or in pairs. Coyotes were fawn killers. The gray wolf is a pack hunter. Our beloved 700-strong moose population will bear some of the burdens of feeding these giant predators. Our whitetail will bear the rest of it.
As the gray wolf expands south and out of the foolish dead zone created by the Adirondack State Park, deer hunters will find it harder and harder to locate suitable deer for harvesting. A few hunters will even avoid hunting lest they encounter a pack of wolves, defend themselves, and end up trading their homes for legal services.
Related: Coyote hunting and deer survival.
Pets, cattle, llamas, chicken, and ducks: Feeding New York’s growing Gray Wolf population.
New York has over a million head of cattle on dairy farms scattered throughout the state. The one thing these herd owners all have in common? Their Governor doesn’t give a shit about them, and the state’s senators and congresspeople mostly come from the city and probably do not even know we have farms in New York.
As gray wolves begin killing New York’s livestock, few newspapers will report it. The death of a few Llamas, being a bit of a rarity still, might make the local penny saver. Dogs and cats? Chickens and ducks? Any family pet? Do the words” acceptable losses” mean anything to you?
Under-reporting, if not a total news blackout, will cover up these attacks. Only those foolish enough to defend their property will ever make the news. They will be swiftly punished for protecting their $3,500 Shih Tzu from being eaten alive, as well their unwillingness to sacrifice a beloved pet for the good of the planet and to prevent global warming.
Gray wolves will enter and inhabit the suburbs, human deaths will soon follow.
In New York, we already have serious problem with suburban coyotes. These coyotes weigh about 35-pounds. The gray wolf that now builds dens under our backyard sheds weighs on average 85-pounds.
Like Israel, which saw nine children, including babies, attacked in one four-month period, gray wolves preying on children is becoming the norm.
Rabies is also on the rise. While most of the small New Yorkers savagely attacked by gray wolves are killed outright, many initially thought to be survivors suffer head and neck wounds that render the standard rabies vaccine ineffective. These ”survivors,” like those of a post-nuclear attack, will wish they had died in the wolf’s mouth.
Every day human activity has ceased. Parks are abandoned. Joggers now run on treadmills lest they catch the movement-based, predatory eyes that await them just off the side of the road. At night, gunshots no longer rouse the sleeping population—the local cops are still authorized to use deadly force.
Suburban New York towns are nothing more than grocery stores for gray wolves. But few ever read, let alone remember, the pleas of their Colorado brethren decades ago.
Howling in protest about the gray wolf in New York.
The last stage of allowing the gray wolf to ”recolonize” New York will be a long, bitter fight between the victims of gray wolves and those who refuse to be educated, let alone sympathetic.
The victims, with their defenders (predator and coyote hunters), long gone, their weapons made illegal, their right to peace and safety denied by unjust laws, crippling fines, and threats of imprisonment, find themselves facing an uphill vote to return to a sense of normalcy and recognition of human priorities over that of mere animals.
Citizens of other states will look on sadly, having already suffered a similar fate. But New Yorkers are governed by people living eleven stories in the air. Nothing will change until wolves are jumping them at cab stands and dragging them out of expensive restaurants.
Perhaps a few will remember and rue the day they nodded and applauded Andrew Cuomo saying, “You don’t need ten bullets to kill a deer.” Perhaps not, but when a pack of wolves attacks your family during a backyard cookout, a full magazine might see a few of you safely inside your house.
We don’t need the gray wolf in New York.
The gray wolf was considered extinct in New York for a reason. Its habitat is gone, and humans have taken it over. Allowing it to recolonize the state brings no benefit, despite the childish notions of pro-wolf groups.
But, like it or not, it will be allowed to return. Taxpayer monies will be spent to ensure it does. The fate I outlined above? It is a certainty. There is nothing we can do to prevent it.
Our only hope is to take action now to secure the election of future legislators who adamantly support only citizens’ interests over those of wild dogs. These elected leaders, who will be ready and willing to amend the law, are the best we can hope for.
That our current situation finds us where it does, that’s on you and me. And the gray wolf? It’s coming, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.