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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