So you want to take a wolf in Idaho this year? You can't trap, you can't bait, you can't use dogs and you can't hunt around Idaho Department of Fish and Game big game feeding sites.

You can shoot members of Ketchum's celebrity Phantom Hill pack, which love to hang out along Idaho 75. But is that really fair chase?

Then should wolves habituated to humans be declared off limits? We don't encourage people to habituate deer, elk or bears.

In 2008 a Wyoming man chased a wolf 35 miles on his snowmobile before he shot it. He considered that fair chase. Do you?

The legality of tapping into the radio collars of wolves with a personal transceiver is unclear. But Fish and Game urges hunters not to kill wolves with radio collars since it costs so much to get them on.

Biologically, none of these issues matter. It a matter of perception and of that long-discussed but often-ignored subject: hunter ethics.

Fish and Game commissioners limited the hunt this year by allowing only 220 wolves to be taken. The Nez Perce can take another 35 so that sets the estimated harvest at 25 percent of Idaho's wolf population. The limit is based on the estimate that the population is growing at a rate of 20 percent a year. Officials hope to reduce the population slowly.

Fish and Game set its season based on a study of wolves conducted in Alaska's Brooks Range from 1987 to 1991.

In Alaska, biologists monitored 50 radio-collared wolves in 25 packs. Researchers reported an average harvest of 47 wolves annually from the study population. Trappers caught wolves throughout the season from November to April, but hunters were mostly successful in the dead of winter in February and March. Idaho's season will end in December.

The Alaska study found that 11 percent of the wolves died naturally, mostly by killing each other.

Young wolves dispersed from the area at high rates, 47 percent for yearlings and 27 percent for 2-year-olds. This dispersion suggests there will be many Idaho wolves leaving to expand the populations elsewhere and to genetically mix with existing populations in Wyoming and Montana.

The Alaskans said the study showed them that wolf populations compensate for the effects of human hunting.

"Given the limited effects of moderate levels of human take on wolf population trends and biases in assessing wolf populations and harvests resulting from the existence of transient wolves, the risks of reducing wolf populations inadvertently through regulated harvest are quite low," the study concluded.

Wolf advocates point out that Alaska has an established, stable metapopulation of wolves that numbers in the thousands. There are somewhere between 1,600 and 2,000 wolves in the U.S. Northern Rockies right now.

Wolf advocates filed a request for an injunction Thursday, so we might not even have a hunting season. U.S. District Judge Donald Malloy is going to have to decide whether Idaho and Montana's hunts are an immediate threat to the region's wolf population and whether he thinks there is a good chance that wolf advocates will win their case in the end.

Rocky Barker: 377-6484