James Barry, Toronto Star

Wolves are cool. Period.

But throughout the ages, they have been seen as vermin that eat little children and deserve to be hunted down and killed. That's not true.

Wolves are graceful animals, and actually, dogs pose more of a threat to us than wolves. A North American wolf has never killed a human, while more and more people are killed or wounded by dogs each year.

And hunting wolves down until they are heavily endangered seems a pretty poor way to repay them, if you ask me. Between 1988 and 1999, 6,000 wolves were killed for pelts in Ontario alone.

Today, an average of 545 wolves are killed per year. And that's just for fur. It's open season for wolves in Ontario. Provincial parks are the only places that offer year-round protection against hunters, and these places are a mere 12 per cent of Ontario.

I think the cruellest weapon against wolves is the snare. The snare is a simple noose made from cable designed to strangle the animal as it struggles against it. And it only works if it catches the wolf around the neck. If it's caught around the leg or body, it's condemned to a slow death by starvation.

I believe that you cannot stop wolf hunting if you don't understand the wolf.

"Wolves move as silently as ghosts along the moonlit river. At times they seem almost transparent. They seem to appear and disapear. The longer you watch, the more you discover," wrote Canadian wildlife painter Robert Bateman.

Wolves have an amazing sense of smell that is 100 times more sensitive than a human's. They also have outstanding hearing. A wolf can hear as far as almost 10 kilometres away in forest and 16 kilometres away on open tundra.

All this and more makes the wolf the perfect predator. It is one of the top predators in the boreal forest. So you see, the wolf must be saved. It is essential to the boreal forest ecosystem.

For more info, go to www.wolvesontario.org. There, you can write a letter to the Premier and the Minister of Natural Resources, and even adopt a wolf.

James Berry, 10, Gr. 5, Oakville

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