What are you talking about? There's tons of wolves in my county. They aren't 'basically exterminated' at all. And there's zero human attacks. Lots and lots of cow attacks though.
Yellowstone park rangers killed the last wolves there in 1926, and by the middle of the 20th century, the total population in the Lower 48 had been reduced to a few hundred in Minnesota and Michigan.
https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/wolf-managemen...
This map shows how now there are nearly 7,000 in the contiguous states of the USA:
https://nywolf.org/learn/u-s-wolf-populations/