I feel comfortable walking back my statement that people are morons for hating wolves in general. I will comment on the elk heard number in Montana though as it was specifically addressed in the podcast I posted. Two bad winters killed 80% of that elk population, which was apparently above average, not wolves. That quoted sentence is misleading because wolves may well be the biggest predator of elk, but it wasn't wolves that killed 14,000 elk in two years.
The other thing that podcast mentions is that cats kill elk as well, and there are just as many or more cats, but no one cares about them because they've always been there. People tend to attribute any and every change to whatever is the newest factor in the equation.