Wrede, others: wolves and cougars essential

Yep, kill off apex predators like grizzlies, wolves and cougars; spray atrazine, neonicotinoids and glyphosate on everything then wonder why cervids like deer and wapiti contract a prion contagion like chronic wasting disease.

John Wrede studied Park Management and Wildlife Management at South Dakota State University, had a long career with SD Game, Fish and Parks and lives in the Black Hills. He has called what South Dakota Republicans have done to habitat, "managerially inexcusable" and is concerned about Dusty Johnson's lack of forest acumen. The following appears at his Faceberg page and has been only lightly edited but reformatted for easier reading here.

In the early 2000's when the cougar had almost fully developed a viable population in the Black Hills and obligatory dispersal of mostly young males was occurring with some regularity; social hand wringing and angry nimrod demands to kill them all due to the belief these apex predators were trashing deer and elk populations and threatening to ambush small children, pets and livestock was loud, irrational and politically caustic. The general theme among gun toters, livestock interests, urban dwellers with the wildlife knowledge of a cement truck, demanded either eliminating the species from the state entirely or excessive hunter harvest to reduce population numbers down below viability. In other words, the public intolerance for this species was nearly pegged out. 

Now, 25 years later, Elk densities are greater than they've been since the late 1950's, deer numbers in the Black Hills are recovering from severe overharvest starting in 2005 and disastrous, continuing habitat issues; there are few if any confirmed records of livestock depredation in the Black Hills, virtually no fatal or even injurious attacks on humans, and no small children savagely killed, carried off and devoured. Harvest quotas haven't been met since a hunting season was established. The only down side to cougars in the Black Hills is an imbalanced and ecologically threatened social structure, age and sex ratios of a cougar population. And the science from Washington State's Large Carnivore Laboratory predicted all of it. 

If SDSU or some other credible research institution under took something like this for Mountain Lions in the State of South Dakota, I'm pretty confident that the results would be the same.