Not living in Idaho but wanting to go there to
hunt elk, I'd like to know the true story.
This person says this.

http://www.forwolves.org/ralph/elk.html

A little of both. There were very, very serious problems with elk and habitat in several regions. My landlord used to guide in the Clearwater region, and it was burned in the catastrophic 1910 fires. After that, the habitat greatly improved. Before that (see the diary of Lewis or Clark, for example), there were very few elk. Afterwards, gobs of them.

Ditto with the "Chamberlain". Until a good bit of it burned ('97????), it was a carpet of lodgepole pine with very few openings. The cow to calf ratio, before the burns and before the wolves, was 11 calves per hundred.

I hunt in 28, and the cow/calf ratio was pretty poor before the burns. I have tracked cows, and seen the wolves intercept the tracks of the cow/calf pair, and run them down. Wolves eat elk, no doubt about it.

Right now, I see as many elk as before in that area, but that is hardly objective, as it is just one guy.

The "moral of the story", in my opinion, is that if you have good habitat, there is room for wolves. If you have bad habitat, wolves will WIPE THE ELK OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

If the elk have all the summer forage they want, and go into the winter as butterballs, they can stand the harrassment. If not, kiss your tag goodbye. JMO, Dutch.

That guys report is pretty biased. The main link at the bottom of his page is the Wolf Recovery Foundation. I'm taking this guys writtings with a cattle salt block sized grain of salt.