The Challenge and Opportunity of Recovering Wolf Populations

The Need for Public Education

It appears that the best way to promote wolf recovery is to encourage public education about wolf management issues so that a significant proportion of the public would support wolf recovery while tolerating some form of control. Public education programs must include the message that any restoration of wolves will ultimately result in a need to control them (Fritts et al. in press). Of course, there will always be animal-rights advocates who never will accept any wolf control. If their views are seen by most of the public as counter-productive to wolf recovery, however, officials can probably be persuaded to allow wolves to live in far more of their former range.

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