Gray wolf mortality patterns in Wisconsin from 1979 to 2012

Abstract Illegal killing (poaching) of wildlife is a problem that warrants legitimate and objective investigation. Treves et al. (2017) use data from reported wolf mortalities in Wisconsin to estimate unreported and unobserved mortality and poaching rates of unmonitored wolves. This publication is frequently cited and often used to advocate for various policy recommendations despite nontrivial problems in analysis resulting in incorrect inference. We provide a constructive examination of this work and we identify significant methodological and analytical flaws that lead to consequential but faulty conclusions about levels of annual mortality that wolf populations can sustain. We also contrast the conclusions of Treves et al. (2017) with established literature on wolf demographics and observed changes in the Wisconsin wolf population and conclude that the observed population growth would not have been possible with mortality rates estimated by their publication.