On Sept. 21, Wisconsin's opening day, a group of young waterfowl hunters made their way to their blind slightly before 4 a.m. Sunrise wasn’t due for more than two hours, but while they waited one of the young hunters in the group thought they heard a deer approaching.
When 19-year-old Chase Melton stood up to look, he discovered it was a wolf. He tried to haze the animal away, but the noise didn’t work. In fact, the animal started trotting toward their blind.
Then one of his friends told him turn around. Another member of the wolf pack was five yards away, unfazed by the sight of multiple hunters. “I probably could have touched it with my hand, that was extremely scary. So now, we’re really panicking were like alright were surrounded we have a wolf charging us right now,” Melton told a reporter from WJFW, an NBC-TV affiliate.
It held its ground, but the other wolf continued closing ground. “This wolf got within 15 yards and I’m like he’s still coming, he’s still coming, he got within 8 to 10 yards and it’s not what I wanted to do but to protect us and to protect them [his fellow hunters] we felt harmed, so I pulled the trigger,” he said about the decision to stop the animal with his 12 gauge.
The animal went down, only to be carried off by another member of its pack. A hunter nearby confirmed there were at least five wolves very close to the blind, with another four standing sentry nearby.
The incident is currently being investigated by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which declined comment. Wolves cannot be hunted or trapped in the state. Killing one threatening human life, however, is not a violation of state or federal law.
Wisconsin’s wolf population is healthy and growing fast enough that livestock depredation is a serious concern. Biologists invested more than two years to create a scientifically sound management program, which includes a limited take of the animals. It won’t become available, however, unless or until the region’s wolves are delisted from the Federal Endangered Species Act.
The management plan was officially adopted in 2023. Animal rights extremists—displeased it includes language that could allow wolf numbers to be managed by hunting sometime in the future—wasted no time in filing a lawsuit.
