Stupid reason #2: Wolves kill elk, caribou, and other ungulates. There are groups, like Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd, who maintain that wolves should not be protected because they kill too many elk. Here’s how friendly the Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd is: they are such good friends with the elk that they want to eliminate the elk’s major natural predator…so there are more elk for the Friends to shoot, with their guns. This is a hunting organization that is annoyed that a natural ecosystem is making it difficult for them to shoot the animals they want to shoot. In many of the Big Sky states, this is how hunting legislation gets written: with input and political pressure from hunters. Stop listening to hunters. Listen to scientists.
Furthermore, there is a great deal of evidence that wolves are actually good for the long-term health of the Yellowstone ecosystem, which is something you certainly can’t say about hunters. Wolves prey on the weak and enfeebled; by culling the elk herd in this way, the remaining elk tend to be stronger and healthier, with less competition for resources. Wolves certainly do not pose any kind of long-term threat to the Yellowstone elk, unlike hunters, who prefer to shoot the strongest and most glorious elk they can find, because this is how you measure your worth if you are the type to measure your worth by your skill at shooting things with guns. Subsistence hunters, by the way, should be thankful for wolves, because subsistence hunters rely on strong and healthy herds, which wolves help maintain. This is how the damn planet works.
Oh, and without wolves, elk (and caribou and moose, if you go further north) experience crazy overpopulation, which is awful for the biological ecosystem, and further leads to a lack of resources which leads to a crash in population far worse than if there were wolves (and mountain lions, and bears) around to naturally cull the population. Wolves–even an unnaturally small population like that in Wyoming–are good for the environment, not bad.
Hunting to maintain natural order is sometimes required; in my home state of Pennsylvania, for example, there is a dangerous overpopulation of white-tailed deer. They have few natural predators, because we’ve shot them all (see: wolves, mountain lions), and there are more than the local ecosystem can handle. They damage forests by eating and trampling young plants, they wander into roads and get hit by cars because they encroach on human areas. They are dangerous, and there is a state program to cull them, in concert with scientific findings, to make sure there is a safe number of deer. Pennsylvania certainly isn’t perfect, but that’s the way this should be done.