Missoulian: How many wolves are howling out there? Which myth do you hear?
This ran last Sunday in Montana’s The Missoulian but I just got around to checking that spot in the list of news feeds. Staffer Rob Chaney does a fine and enterprising job rounding up some local folks to put life in his tale of wolves, debate on whether to foster more of them or shoot most of those already there, and the deep reasons people can be at such loggerheads over them.
There is no fresh news here, strictly speaking. But the piece admirably puts faces and voices on the debate. It also, as far as I can tell, can be read by almost anybody at any spot in the spectrum of opinion and provide something with which to nod in agreement. Other parts might tick most anybody off, too, but the writer’s biases are not so easy to see.
Also to the writer’s credit is his high placement of one primary source’s plea to protagonists that they go beyond opinion and instinct and put data behind them.
- Charlie Petit
