Free: Contests & Raffles.
It doesn’t matter whether any voters live in Kootenai or Lolo — western Montana’s national forests are home to a fierce and breathing debate likely to play prominently in the state’s 2012 Senate contest.The wolves aren’t going away.As Washington has clashed over how many billions of dollars to cut from the federal budget, some Montanans focused on a provision tucked into the massive spending bills that would have allowed them to begin hunting gray wolves, which have been protected by the federal Endangered Species Act for more than three decades.While some environmental groups are howling, the consensus among the state’s political elite in both parties supports the immediate hunting of gray wolves, which numbered at least 524 in Montana at the beginning of 2010, according to state data.