Yellowtone Wolf Research Paper

Yellowstone Wolves Around the late 1920’s bounty hunters from the government exterminated the park’s last native wolves as part of a national wolf extermination program to protect the farmer’s livestock.In a exert from an interview Scott said “These animals themselves have not killed livestock, and don't know how” and “ They'll learn how to kill wild prey from these older wolves that we're putting them with” so the wolves have not killed livestock because the will learn how to eat wild prey.I believe the wolves should stay in Yellowstone. I believe the wolves should stay in Yellowstone because they help out the ecosystem.In 1955 when the wolves were reestablished into the park the elk population was around 18,000 .With all these elks in the park they would eat a lot of the resources and the plants started to struggle.The aspen tree is one example of one of the plants struggling with all these elks because MacNulty says “When you have a lot of snow on the ground, you don’t have access to the grass.”With …show more content…
The wolves in Yellowstone provide more food for the other animals because once they finish eating the part they eat than other animals can go and eat the parts they didn’t.Before the wolves were restored back into Yellowstone the elk mostly died from deep snows.According to researchers from the University of California at Berkeley the combination of less snow and more wolves benefits scavengers from big to small animals like ravens and grizzly bears.As Chris Wilmers said scavengers used to rely on winter-killed elk for food now they depend on wolf-killed elk and this benefits ravens, eagles, magpies, coyotes and bears.All these animals scavenge off carcasses and eagles, ravens and all the meat eaters benefit by the protein that the wolves leave on the landscape(MacNulty).Ed Bangs said “It turns out that the Indian legends of ravens following wolves are true-they do follow them because wolves mean