" he had reluctantly approved the shooting of a handful of Yellowstone wolves who had attacked livestock grazing near the park. Such culling wouldn’t normally have been allowed under the Endangered Species Act, but a special concession had been made to ranchers in the original reintroduction plan: any reintroduced wolves who preyed on livestock would be shot. The wolves’ overall impact on ranching hadn’t been severe; around two hundred cattle—out of roughly five million across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming—were lost to predation in an average year. (By comparison, tens of thousands of cattle were killed every year by winter storms, lightning, floods, or drought.) But some individual operations near the "

― , The Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West