[NCC]

By the good old days, are you referring to the days following the three mass poisoning campaigns (last one was in the 60's I think) that the Alberta government did?

Do a little research about the ungulate numbers when whitey first came out here. In Silence of the North (~1910), the author writes about following a moose track for days in Northern Alberta because it was the only one they has seen all winter, and boiling the muskrat hides to make soup as they hadn't seen a living thing in the bush for months. Buffalo and antelope were plentiful on the prairies, but that was about it. Lewis and Clarke found the same thing when they went west.

Currently, the only thing that controls the population of wolves is starvation. If you think that something else does, I'd like to hear it.

There is video evidence of one grizzly bear killing 50 calves in one calving season in BC. I don't think they happened to catch the most efficient calf killer in the history of bears, I think that is a typically activity. Even if 10% of the bears in BC are half as good as that one, that is 37 500 ungulate calves being killed per year. (15 000 x 10% x 25). It doesn't matter how much habitat restoration we do, the predator numbers will grow as the quickly as their food source will allow.

Cutlines and roads have allow wolves to travel faster and find stuff to kill. whitetails, elk, and wild horses in the foothills and mountains provide wolves with nutrition to keep them alive between caribou kills. Fire suppression has led to brush encroachment and less habitat. I get that. But that doesn't explain why the ungulate numbers have crashed in vast areas where there are no people, no poachers, no industry, no wild horses, no roads, and plenty of forage and moose and elk are thriving in every area of the province where there are no wolves and no grizzly bears.

As for the grizzly bear hunt affecting numbers, I saw one grizzly bear in my first 10 sheep hunting trips. The last sheep hunt I was on, I saw 7 in one bowl. That leads me to believe that the hunt has certainly affected the bear numbers.