Reply to comments by Olson et al . 2017 and Stien 2017

The management of large carnivores remains a contentious issue in many countries. Among the most contentious management options is ‘tolerance hunting’, or the killing of predators to increase tolerance among groups of people who do not accept the presence of these animals [1,2]. In [3,4], we used Bayesian state space models to evaluate the hypothesis that liberalizing culling of wolves changed wolf population dynamics from 1995 to 2012, and concluded it slowed growth, which we inferred was owing to increased poaching. Olson et al . [5] and Stien [6] re-visit our paper and we address their criticisms below.First, we disagree with Olson et al .'s [5] and Stien's [6] assertions that our paper ignores the literature or reports it in a biased manner. We simply disagree about the interpretation of the literature as we explain below. While they can have a different interpretation of those papers, it does not mean that ours is incorrect and Stien's [6, p. 1] phrasing ‘biased reporting of previously published results’ almost suggests intent from us to mislead the reader. Both Olson et al . [5] and Stien [6] raised the issue of density dependence analysed by Stenglein et al . [7]. In that paper, the information on density dependence relevant to our paper is in figures 3, S2.4, S2.5 and S2.6 (we cannot find reported numerical estimates on how recruitment changed during the relevant period for our study in [7]). Stenglein et al . [7, p. 5] wrote that ‘The evidence for a negative slope of the line for t > 18 was 69.0% (proportion of …