No, I assert no such thing. I assert that the hunters I know feel this way. I wrote nothing about feeling this way myself. I did not query them on how well they actually understood the issue of hunting wolves in Alaska. The idea that we "need to play stewards of the land and therefore kill large predators is almost always BS anyway. Far, far more often because we have killed large predators (like wolves) their prey begin to become numerous enough to be problematic.
>> Animals being sought and killed for population control are being hunted.
>> When bison from Yellowstone are killed by ranchers who erroneously believe
>> they transmit brucellosis to their cattle they are hunted and killed.
>>
>
> The wolves are not being hunted, except in the very general sense you
> favor. They are being exterminated in an expedient manner given the
> climate and the particulars of the regions this "hunting" is occurring
> in. I note your failure to lodge similar objections to rattlesnake
> drives, where other "unsportsmanlike" behavior is commonly used or for
> the control of rodents in domiciles. Do you secretly think that mouse
> traps should be outlawed unless they are humane? What are your other
> thoughts on the "exterminate versus hunt" topic?
I didn't mention rattlesnakes because the topic was wolves. I didn't mention how I felt about hunting elephants either, so what? Again you're attributing the idea that it is unsportsmanlike (a term I never used even to describe the opinions conveyed to me by others) so you're not actually responding to what I wrote. For what it's worth humans have no need to hunt rattlesnakes in large numbers to "control their population". That too is BS.
John Thornton