Demanding that wolf populations be allowed to continue to increase is not only a false conservation goal, but also a counterproductive tactic that is… - L. David Mech

It is beyond ridiculous that wolves need to study a human or that they are capable of it.

In the recent past, wolves were labeled a flagship species or an umbrella, indicator, or keystone species, depending on what conservation market one was trying to penetrate... A flagship species is an attraction to nearly all society's strata, but wolves are not welcomed by all factions of society. With a few rare exceptions, the rural world opposes wolves, so the animal's flagship role is restricted primarily to urbanites or to local areas. Wolves are certainly a powerful flagship species for the conservation movement, particularly that of affluent societies with strong lobbies in large cities, but a true flagship species should be able to move an entire society toward a goal.
Neither are wolves a good umbrella species (i.e., a species, usually high in the ecological pyramid, whose conservation necessarily fosters that of the rest of the chain) in that they can live well on a variety of food resources and in areas with an impoverished prey base. Wolves are not a keystone species either, in that they are not essential for the presence of many other species (e.g., herbivores flourish in areas devoid of wolves). And wolves are not necessarily indicators of good habitat quality or integrity because they are too generalist to be good indicators of the presence of a pristine trophic chain.</br>The above labels have been very useful in many circumstance and have contributed significantly to wolf recovery. They may still be useful in the future, but we should be aware that they are shortcuts to "sell a product" rather than good scientific grounds on which to build conservation.

The misinformation promulgated by wolf advocacy groups ranges from minor technical errors to major deception and fraud. Technical biological misinformation, though bothersome to professionals working with wolves, is not as serious as deception about such issues as the status and trends in wolf populations. This latter type of misinformation tends to motivate well-meaning wolf advocates to press their causes through letter-writing campaigns, public meetings, lobbying, and lawsuits. For example, animal welfare and wolf advocacy groups have been advertising for funds in major national newspapers for years, claiming that wolves were threatened in Denali National Park and other parts of Alaska, despite documentation to the contrary. These misrepresentations have even made it into conference proceedings. In the non-peer-reviewed proceedings of a nonprofit citizen organization, "Defenders of Wildlife's Restoring the Wolf Conference," undocumented claims were made that the wolf has been eliminated from "95% of its former range" and "95% of its historic range in Noth America". The actual figures are closer to 30% of its global range and 40% of its North American range.