Political Quotes

“My friends across the aisle have a pretty selective interest in numbers. They seem to want to take a single aggregate number for the wolf population in the United States and legislatively delist that population in a way that contravenes science, contravenes the way the Endangered Species Act is supposed to work, but they ignore a lot of other numbers. Let's talk about some numbers. First of all, when we try to scare people about wolves, we should probably acknowledge that you are far more likely to die falling out of bed than from a gray wolf attack. My colleague, Mr. Beyer, explained that not once in the last 100 years has someone died from a wolf attack in the United States. Wolves rarely attack people, and in the majority of documented cases, which are very few, humans ended up provoking the wolf or feeding it to cause that encounter. Further, wolves are a minimal threat to livestock, despite the hue and cry that we hear about this. Wolves are responsible for the loss of fewer than two-hundredths of a single percent of livestock every year. Dogs and coyotes are responsible for far greater numbers of livestock losses, and even those losses fall well behind losses due to illness or weather. While there is inherent risk in raising livestock in wolf habitat, the losses are small. Importantly, ranchers are compensated for any financial loss due to wolf predation.…”