Wolves, a Serious Threat to Livestock Producers
By Heather Smith-Thomas
“Cattle and wolves are never going to be compatible. Some people keep saying that wildlife people and cattlemen are going to have to learn to manage for wolves, but that’s impossible. It’s hard to ‘manage’ when you are always on the losing end.”
—Len McIrvin
Imaginary Scenarios
Wolves have become the noble, beautiful creatures of myths in the minds of most Americans; it’s easy to believe imaginary scenarios when a person has no personal experience with the reality of the beast. The average American has had no reason not to believe the myths about wolves—since most published materials perpetuate the myths. Some Western ranchers, however, remember their parents and grandparents telling about bloody carnage when wolves attacked their herds and flocks, often killing for sport, or leaving half-dead animals in their wake after a night’s spree. These stories and accounts of wolf attacks have been discredited by modern “wisdom” about wolves. Now ranchers are paying the price.
Despite predator control campaigns, wolves were never eliminated, and never even endangered; there were, in fact, thriving populations in Canada, Alaska, and Minnesota. Yet most US ranchers from the 1950s through the mid-1990s could sleep easy at nights, not having to worry about wolves wreaking havoc with their livestock. This all changed when government agencies transplanted an “experimental” population of wolves in the northern Rockies in 1995.
Controversy over “Reintroduction” of Wolves
Rural communities in the West fought against wolf “reintroduction,” knowing that these animals would have a significantly adverse impact on wildlife and livestock and possibly human safety. Their views and arguments were overshadowed by the broader voice of Eastern public as well as Western cities (where the average person is completely removed from the realities of where his/her food comes from and wolves live mostly in zoos). Both of these large segments of population thought it would be nice to have wolves on the Western landscape again. Reintroducing a native animal, considered to be an important part of this ecosystem, sounded like a great idea, but this reasoning was flawed for two reasons.
First, wolves were not historically present fulltime in the Intermountain West, as there was no stable food source. Wolves were primarily plains animals, following bison, elk, and antelope herds. From the records of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1806, we know there were very few bison, deer, or elk in central Idaho in pre-settlement times. The plains wolves during that era came into central Idaho only when the bison did, on a sporadic basis. The Native Americans of that era nearly starved for lack of meat. They had to travel annually across the mountains, onto the plains of what is now Montana to hunt bison to obtain meat to help them get through winter. Wolves moved into Idaho after the settlers came, and the early livestock industry provided a prey base. The wolves that harassed livestock in the central Rockies during the late 1800s and early 1900s were diligently hunted and eliminated. Big-game herds expanded with less hunting pressure and with the introduction of elk in the 1930s by the Idaho Fish and Game Department.
Second, the wolves that were dumped into the central Rockies were big Canadian wolves that could weigh 130 pounds or more, not the smaller native wolves of the American plains. Wolves are killing machines, and big wolves have big appetites.
Additional Issues
When the federal government made public its plan to introduce wolves, many Westerners feared that wolves were being used as part of a larger agenda designed to wrest control and management of private land away from landowners. Those who raised livestock were also fearful that the introduced wolves would not stay in their “designated areas,” like Yellowstone Park. The elk herds in the Park generally come down out of the high country in winter and often mingle with ranchers’ cattle on feeding grounds. Most of the game herds in the West spend a lot of time on private land, sharing pastures and hayfields with domestic animals. Wolves don’t just stick to wild prey—livestock are easy targets, and ranchers felt that wolves would simply follow the prey source.
The wolf reintroduction plan not only infringed on ranchers’ property rights and ability to protect their livestock (especially if wolves denned on a ranch, that area would be off-limits for traditional uses), but it also boded economic losses due to depredation. Ranchers feared and resented this infringement and were afraid of the personal tragedies that would result. Those fears have become reality.
For people who raise livestock as a way of life, their animals are not just a paycheck. After spending a lifetime delivering baby calves or lambs, doctoring the sick ones, and fine-tuning every ability and instinct to become competent caretakers of livestock, the rancher won’t forsake his animals. The rancher is responsible for their well-being, and is morally committed to taking care of them. To find a favorite old cow lying hamstrung and bleeding or young calves totally missing—with their mothers upset and bawling—is unacceptable.
The wolf advocates promised there would be ways to reimburse ranchers for their losses, but such compensation would never cover all the economic losses or any of the emotional losses. If a baby calf is killed, would the rancher be reimbursed for what it would have been worth later as a big steer or herd sire, or as replacement heifer in the herd? How do you put a value on permanent genetic potential lost? And how do you alleviate the personal loss and anguish the rancher suffers when watching his animals being maimed and killed? Or how do you compensate for the fear of wolves attacking ranchers and/or their children?
Ranchers fight bad weather, livestock diseases, and other threats. In good conscience, they cannot stand meekly by and watch wolves slaughter their livestock. To demand that we couldn’t shoot a wolf to protect our livestock or wildlife created an inevitable clash that would make lawbreakers out of most ranchers and many sportsmen. Wolf protection according to the Endangered Species Act was an unworkable law. If the majority of people can’t abide by or live with a law, then it’s a poor law, and this should be reason enough to re-think it. Little is said in popular press about the viewpoint of the people who live with wolves in the northern Rockies. This chapter lets people hear the voices of those of us who live with wolves.
Wolf Depredations
Within days after the first wolves were turned loose in the backcountry of central Idaho, a wolf killed a young calf belonging to Gene Hussey, an eighty-three-year-old rancher on Iron Creek near Salmon, Idaho. The wolf was shot, perhaps by someone driving by the pasture on the road, since in ranch country it is common practice to protect livestock from predators. When the dead wolf and dead calf were discovered side by side, Hussey was afraid of what the feds might think and called a local veterinarian, Dr. Robert Cope, to perform a post-mortem examination on both the calf and the collared wolf.
Later, when the federal experts arrived, they began harassing Hussey, assuming he had shot the wolf. They took both bodies for their own post-mortem examinations and claimed that the calf was stillborn and that the wolf did not kill it but was simply scavenging. What the experts didn’t know was that Dr. Cope videotaped the original autopsy as he performed it, which showed that the calf had milk in its stomach and fully inflated lungs. According to Cope, this was indisputable evidence that the calf was born alive. When the feds found out about the tape, they realized they’d gone too far, twisting the facts to fit their own purposes and to keep up the façade about wolves.
The swat-team mentality of the government agents, who threatened to persecute anyone who dared shoot a wolf, was emphatically resented by rural communities. It didn’t make sense that the penalty for killing a wolf to protect one’s animals or in self-defense was worse than for killing a human for the same reason.
Sheep Depredation
The Soulen family near Weiser, Idaho, owns one of the sheep outfits that early on was significantly affected by wolf depredation. Margaret Soulen Hinson ranches with her father and brother in a family-owned corporation. “My grandfather started our business in the 1920s, and I’m the third generation,” she says proudly.
Soulens have about ten thousand ewes and one thousand cows that graze on a mix of public and private land. Margaret explained:
We own about fifty-thousand acres and also run on BLM and Forest Service, as well as some state grazing leases and private leases. Our range operation covers about 450,000 acres of rangeland located in eight Idaho counties. We had our first loss to wolves in 1996, shortly after they were introduced. Most of our wolf depredations have been on the Payette National Forest near McCall, Idaho. We’re only about eighty miles (as the crow flies) from where wolves were turned loose in the Frank Church Wilderness. It didn’t take the wolves long to find our sheep. They love lamb!
The first year, Soulens lost thirty head.
We didn’t know what to expect when we started losing sheep. We didn’t know if the killing would continue or not. The first night they tore up thirteen head. We then did everything we could to keep them out of our sheep, since it was illegal to kill the wolves. We took extra people and slept on the bed grounds with the sheep, but we still lost thirty head that summer. It was a learning experience, because wolves have been gone from our area for a long time. Even my grandfather didn’t have any experience with wolves.
The next year they lost twenty-eight head. The loss numbers bounced around: thirty-seven head in 1999; five in 2000; none in 2001; two in 2002; fifty-five in 2003; and 332 in 2004.
In 2004, the Cook pack, about thirteen wolves, hit the sheep before we even made it to the National Forest. They killed seventy-eight head in one night and continued to hit the sheep. This pack was living in an area where all our bands had to pass through, and they hit almost every band. We also had many other wolves in the area that year. Every band had wolves around them.
Finally the Soulens received help from US Fish and Wildlife Services, which came in and removed the Cook pack, but by that time, the wolves had done a lot of damage. “It was almost August by the time they took out those wolves,” she says. In 2004, it was still controversial as to whether the government agency would allow removal of any wolves, and many people still didn’t think wolves would ever be much problem for livestock.
Soulens also worked with Defenders of Wildlife and other wolf advocate groups to try to do whatever they could to co-exist with wolves.
We bought extra guard dogs and had extra people sleeping out with the sheep. We tried rag boxes, cracker shells, gun training for the herders, etc. Our herders became more experienced at recognizing when wolves are a danger. When the guys know wolves are around, they stay with the sheep twenty-four/seven. But the reality is that sometimes you have to remove the wolves that are causing too much damage. They become habituated to preventative measures and won’t let up. By taking out some of the wolves, you can break that cycle.
In 2005, we lost about 220 head; in 2006, we lost 175; in 2007, we lost 125; and in 2008, we lost twenty-five. We did a graph to look at what the wolf population numbers have been, in comparison with our losses. There was an exponential increase in wolf population—and our losses reflected that increase. One good thing about all this was that the Idaho Conservation League actually sent out a press release in support of removing that pack, which helped people recognize what some of these issues were. I think people are starting to recognize that wolves kill livestock. The stories early on were that they only kill the weak and the lame, or that they only eat deer and elk and leave the livestock alone. In reality, wolves are predators and opportunists. The idea that they kill only what they will eat is also false. With sheep, especially, they’ll just tear them up. I’ve seen instances where they rip them open and string the guts out. They may eat only a small portion, or they may eat the entire animal to where there’s only a skull left that looks like it’s been boiled clean. Sometimes you never find anything; the animal is completely gone. Hopefully, the delisting and hunting season will put some fear into the wolves, if they are shot at more often.
It may be difficult for hunters to find them, however, because wolves are often nocturnal in their depredations and are very good at hiding during daylight hours.
Our losses typically occur at night. Where sheep are herded, at least someone is there, and you can get the problem identified right away. It’s more difficult for cattle people to protect their animals than it is for sheep producers, because cattle are scattered and not as closely watched like the sheep with their herders. You can’t be out with cattle that much; often you never find the animals that are killed and eaten.
In order to have any compensation for losses or to document a wolf problem, livestock owners must prove that it was actually wolves that did the killing.
This can be an issue in our remote range areas. The herders have a challenge to get the word out and to get Wildlife Service people up there to document and verify the kill before the carcass has deteriorated or something else has eaten on it. Wildlife Services and the US Fish and Wildlife have been very responsive when we had problems. They have been very good to work with.
The Soulens were compensated for most of their early losses. State funding—federal money that came through the state—paid for the probable wolf kills.
Defenders of Wildlife paid for every documented wolf kill and were fair on prices. We were one of the first ranchers to experience losses. They’ve been fair, also, in what they’ve paid. One issue is the challenge of getting it documented in a timely manner.
There are significant losses when dealing with wolves, however, that are hard to quantify and document and for which the producer will never be compensated.
The compensation doesn’t make up for all the depredation losses, because there are some things you never get compensated for—like all the extra labor, the stress on the sheep, and the lower weight gains when wolves are harassing them.
Wolves create a lot of extra work for the herders, the foreman, and others who are dealing with this situation. We’ve had to herd the bands a lot tighter. They’re not as spread out, and it’s a little harder on the land. The lambs are not gaining as well, as a result. The herders have to sleep out with the sheep or bring them back closer to camp at night. This is not optimum management. Typically we’d herd them a little looser, and they would graze more.
The wolves have added many additional expenses to their sheep operation.
We’ve also needed more guard dogs. Our herders know what to expect when they hear warnings from the guard dogs. The dogs make a different sound when it’s wolves than when it’s bear or coyotes. Our foreman said that, when wolves are around, the dogs cry. The dogs are afraid of them. We’ve lost guard dogs to wolves. We run four guard dogs per band. If it’s just a single wolf, the guard dogs gang up, and the wolf will back down, but if there’s more than one wolf, they kill the guard dogs. We used to use Pyrenees guard dogs, but now we use Akbash and Akbash-cross dogs. They are a little more athletic and aggressive. The dogs are expensive; the last ones we bought were $650 apiece.
During that first year, when there was a lot of effort trying to trap the first pair of wolves on Pearl Creek to relocate them, Wildlife Services didn’t have manpower to deal with other problems. They did finally relocate the wolves, but in some of the other bands we were experiencing bear and cougar damage, and nobody was available to deal with those issues. The wolves have taken a lot of time and a lot of money.
When wolves were introduced, the USFWS didn’t realize how well they would do or how fast their numbers would grow. With total protection for more than a dozen years, wolves became bold.
If you look at it from the wolf advocates’ point of view, this is a tremendous success story. Moving forward with delisting and a more pro-active management system for wolves must be the next step. With our operation, we were granted “take permits” early on, so we could shoot a wolf if it was in our sheep. But in all those years, we never managed to shoot a wolf. Wolves can be very difficult to actually shoot.
Ranchers like the Soulens hope there won’t be too many roadblocks (lawsuits by wolf advocates to stop the wolf-hunting seasons) in progressing toward workable management of these predators.
I was disappointed that Defenders of Wildlife and some of the other groups filed for the injunction to halt hunting. They’re not being fair. The wolves’ numbers had exceeded their goal, so it’s time to move forward with the delisting and start managing them. This blocking effort is not productive. It makes the environmental community look bad.
Ranchers want something logical and workable, and when the environmental and wolf advocate groups refuse to work toward a management solution, it’s viewed in a negative light, and cooperation becomes more difficult.
Learning Curve
Nearly twenty years after the wolf project was launched, almost every rancher in Central-Eastern Idaho has seen wolves or their tracks, and livestock losses are all too common. In 1999, Ralph McCrea, a rancher near Leadore, Idaho, lost twenty lambs to a wolf that came into his flock two different nights.
This wolf was collared and had been turned loose in Yellowstone Park at noon on a Wednesday. The next day he went through Dillon, Montana (seventy miles away), and by Friday night, he’d come over the mountains and was at my place killing sheep.
McCrea has also been losing calves; for several years wolves killed some of his big calves on the range, and then wolves began coming into his calving pens at night, killing baby calves right next to his house.
James Whittaker runs a thousand cows near Leadore, Idaho, and experienced his first confirmed losses (three bred heifers) in 2007. In 2008, Whittaker had two confirmed kills within a mile of his house.
In 2009, we had four confirmed kills on our range. It’s hard to find them soon enough to get the losses confirmed; our range is thirty-five miles long. All told, we lost forty-five calves that summer. Our annual loss went from 2 percent to nearly 5 percent that year.
When you lose a calf from other causes, you usually find the carcass, but with a wolf kill, you may not find anything.
It’s like the animal evaporated. We get paid for confirmed kills but not for the ones that disappear or that we find too late to determine the cause of death.
Bruce Mulkey, who ranches near Baker, Idaho, recalls wolf advocates on a panel discussion at Idaho State University saying that only 1 percent of livestock are killed by wolves, and that ranchers lose more to disease and other problems. “But if you are part of that 1 percent and happen to lose 15 percent to 20 percent of your calves, that’s a huge loss.”
Jay Smith, on a ranch near Carmen, Idaho, did some research of his own, looking at ranchers’ BLM use reports for several years. He checked as far back as these records go to assess range losses on the Diamond-Moose allotment.
I documented how much loss ranchers experienced before wolf introduction, compared with losses after the wolves came. Very soon after wolves were brought in, John Aldous and some of the other ranchers on that allotment had huge losses.
Aldous lost thirty-four calves in one small area near Leesburg the first year.
Then the wolves scattered out and hit other ranchers besides me. They had dens on the border between our range and the Edwards’. Our elk population dropped from three hundred in Moose Creek Meadows fifteen years ago to where now you’re lucky to see twenty elk. The USFWS eliminated the Gerano wolf pack three times, and they just kept coming back. I think some of the offspring that go off on their own come back and regroup.
Fay and Eron Coiner have a grazing ranch high in the mountains above Salmon, Idaho, and spend summers there with their cattle. Fay says they had more than one hundred elk on their ranch, but by the third summer of wolves, they were down to thirteen elk.
Now we are lucky to see any elk. But we lose at least one calf a year to wolves, even with Eron riding out there every day to try to chase them off. He watched one of our calves being killed, and that was gruesome. Eron was given a permit to kill any wolves that were with our cattle, and he’s shot a few, but they still came back.
Coiners worked closely with the USFWS and Fish & Game to help them manage wolves rather than have to kill them. Fay explained:
We did our best to make the wolves understand that this is our territory and that our place should be off limits. When the government agencies got together to do a flagging experiment around our ranch to try to deter the wolves, it didn’t work very well because wolves are curious. They came to see what was going on, and that summer we lost three calves. We’ve used other deterrents, too, such as rubber bullets and firecrackers to scare them away, but the wolves came right back.
Often wolves don’t kill an animal outright, but bite at it numerous times (leaving characteristic scratch marks and bruising the underlying tissues), wearing the animal down, and they often start eating on it before it dies. The Coiners have had numerous maimed and injured cattle that don’t survive, even with intensive medical care, which costs a lot of money.
Ross Goddard, a rancher near Tendoy, Idaho, says his cattle on summer range are very unsettled—constantly nervous and on the move.
They don’t graze as much or gain as much. And I can’t use my range allotments properly. If we put cows in a certain area and they’re supposed to be there for a month, two days later, they may all be out of there and in the next unit, and you can’t get them to go back. It disrupts your whole season’s grazing management.
His grazing use is under strict observation because of fish habitat.
We have to keep cattle off riparian areas because of endangered fish, so we shove the cattle into higher country right into wolf domain.
Bruce Mulkey says that after wolves harass cattle, you can’t gather or move them with dogs anymore. “The cows are all stirred up, and all they want to do is fight the dogs.” Even the cattle that have been trained to work with dogs get on the fight and are overly protective of their calves. Coiners saw wolves harassing a cow-calf pair until the cow was utterly exhausted trying to defend her calf. “That cow was bellowing and frothing at the mouth and on her last legs,” says Fay.
Whittaker says cattle are much flightier when wolves are around. “One group of cows ran and hit the fence and tore the gate down, getting into the adjacent pasture and mixing with another group of cattle.” McRea says that when wolves go through his private pastures, the cows go crazy, bellowing and running around the field trying to find their calves. Many ranchers have lost young calves—trampled and killed by stampeding cows.
I had a calf run over; he got rolled around and ended up with a crooked neck, but survived. I had a month-old calf chewed up by wolves, with his intestines hanging out. The vet came, and we sewed him back up and gave him antibiotics, but he only lived two days.
Cattle that survive a wolf attack or calves crippled by stampeding cows can’t be sold for top dollar with the rest of the group at sale time. The rancher has to butcher them or sell them at a loss. Ranchers are not compensated for the costs of doctoring injured animals or for cows that must be sold because they lost a year of production due to loss of their calves, which eats into the sustainability of the cow herd and makes it necessary to raise or buy more replacement heifers. Ranchers are also not compensated for lower weights on market calves. McCrea said:
In the winter, wolves have been coming in to kill at night, and my calves lose weight. I have to corral them every night so they’re close enough that I can get to them when the wolves come in. By spring the cattle don’t want to go back into the corral at night, but I don’t dare leave them a mile and a half away from the house with no chance to protect them. When you get up in the night to check cows, it’s horrible that part of your calving equipment has to be a rifle on your back. I was within twenty-five yards of one wolf, right in the corral with the cows, with just a flashlight.
Now he takes a gun with him whenever he goes out into the field. McCrea says he realizes that we can never completely control wolves to keep them from killing livestock, but he points out that it would help if ranchers could get full compensation for missing animals. “If the public insists we have wolves, they should pay the price and help us resolve the problems wolves have created.” Many ranchers feel that wolf introduction—together with the impositions it has caused—is a taking of private property by the federal government.
Working with the Agencies
Every state’s laws are different in how problem wolves can be handled, and ranchers must work with the state as well as federal agencies. When the wolves were still listed as endangered, however, in all instances, a wolf kill of livestock had to be confirmed before any action was taken to remove the wolves. Rick Williamson, Idaho branch of USFWS, said:
When I’m called to a rancher’s place to investigate a suspected depredation, we skin out the dead animal(s) and look for evidence such as bite marks and tracks. We have to determine whether the animal was actually killed—not just fed on—by wolves. There are four categories in our evaluation: confirmed kill, probable kill, possible kill, and other. For a while, the Defenders of Wildlife would pay a rancher 100 percent for the loss if it was confirmed and 50 percent for a probable kill.
Once we confirmed a kill, we conferred with state Fish & Game because they have the final authority to tell us whether we can remove a wolf, or if we can trap and collar it. For instance, we collared a wolf on Dale Edwards’s place, and he had a telemetry receiver so he could check for presence of that wolf.
We have some other tactics, like radio-activated scare boxes that we can put out near a den site or rendezvous site to deter wolves. But we have to be careful because, in some situations, we may be just moving them from one producer to his neighbor. I think the best thing we can do, if we have depredation, is to remove the problem wolves.
Now things have changed with the wolves delisted and the state involved in managing wolves.
A few years ago, a graduate student, John Oakley, did a study for his master’s degree, looking at numbers of livestock killed by wolves. Williamson explained:
Oakley was trying to determine how many kills you don’t find. He and his helpers radio-tagged more than 350 calves on the Diamond-Moose allotment. What Oakley discovered was that, for every kill found, there could be up to eight head you don’t find.
In our state, most of the wolf problems with livestock are occurring on private property. People are seeing wolves near their homes. A few years ago, the White Hawk pack was causing problems on Carmen Creek, and over a three-year period, there were more than fifty livestock kills—and all but two of those were on private land. When we later removed that pack, it stirred up a hornets’ nest of protest around the country. But people need to understand that wolves have no business being on private property.
Wolves: Smart and Cagey
Control of problem wolves has proven difficult and expensive. Problem wolves are generally relocated or removed by USFWS, but this, too, can be labor intensive and frustrating. Whittaker says one year, when the wolves hit him hard, there was a den two miles from his house, and the government trappers worked all summer trying to get the wolves and only killed two.
They trapped one and shot one from a plane. It’s hard to get one from a plane, because if you don’t get them the first time, they hide when they hear it coming.
Allen Bodenhamer, a rancher near Baker, Idaho, says wolves were killing calves in his barnyard at night and hiding up on the mountain in the timber during the day. “The government hunters flew over our area six times trying to find the wolves and never got any of them.” During calving season, Bodenhamer and his wife were out checking the cows every hour but didn’t see the wolves that came in to kill their calves. “For those wolves to come in between checks with our spotlights, they must have figured out our pattern.”
Jay Smith runs cattle on seventy-five thousand acres of public land. He says:
At least one of us (myself, my wife, my mom and dad, or the hired help) is out there horseback almost every day. We’ve only had close enough encounters for shooting opportunity about ten times since 1995. It’s a lucky accident if a person is able to shoot a wolf. The only two wolves I’ve seen that were close enough to shoot, I wasn’t carrying a gun at the time. Also, if they feel pressured by humans, they go nocturnal and kill livestock at night.
Aldous says you have to be lucky to shoot a wolf. “In our area there’s so much timber that we may only get a glimpse of one when we’re going down a trail with a herd of cows, and then it’s gone.”
Wolf Hunts Not Enough
Most ranchers and sportsmen feel the wolf hunts won’t be enough to control the expanding wolf population. They also feel that wolf numbers are much higher than federal and state game departments estimate. Only a small percent of the population is actually radio-collared, and there’s no way to count them all. Officially estimated numbers have increased enough, however, that wolves in the central Rockies were finally delisted and no longer protected by the Endangered Species Act. Some states have been allowed to manage them as a game animal and initiate a hunting season.
In Idaho, an unlimited number of wolf tags can be sold by Fish & Game, but the hunt in each unit closes as soon as the allotted number of wolves is harvested. For the first hunt in 2009, there were 26,384 tags sold in Idaho—for a chance to kill 220 wolves. Due to lack of hunting success, however, several units remained open after the late December deadline and stayed open into spring. Some quotas were still not filled by summer 2010.
Jay Smith says that having a hunting season is a step in the right direction, but, “You could open the season year round, and we wouldn’t put a dent in the wolf population.”
Whittaker feels the hunting season won’t make much difference. “Amateur hunters just make them more elusive. If you shoot at a wolf and miss, he won’t give you that opportunity again.”
With the increasing impact on elk herds in certain areas of the state, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG) now realizes there must be more control of wolves than the hunting seasons are providing. As of January 2013, the IDFG began considering two more ways to work toward its goal of reducing current wolf numbers to a manageable level without risking coming under federal protection again. The first proposal is to take fifty thousand dollars from their coyote control program in eastern Idaho and use it to supplement wolf control efforts in areas where elk herds are in decline. The second idea is to develop relationships with successful wolf trappers and possibly give them financial assistance to offset some of their costs, as long as the trappers are working in those same areas where elk are being significantly impacted.
Wolf-Cattle Interactions Study
The increasing wolf population in the West is having a significant impact on ranchers and livestock, but the extent of this impact had not been well documented. The Oregon Beef Council (with help from USDA) funded a ten-year study project that began in 2008 to look at how wolf activity affects cattle behavior. GPS collars are being used on some of the cattle on ranches and a few wolves in the study area to monitor movements of these animals and when and where they interact. Dr. Pat Clark, range scientist at Northwest Watershed Research Center, USDA-ARS at Boise, Idaho, has been involved with this study from its beginning and was instrumental in helping with the GPS collars. He had used collars on range cattle for an earlier study looking at how cattle changed their use patterns after a fire. Those first commercial GPS collars cost about $5,000 apiece, so Clark decided to build his own. With the help of some Boise State University engineering students, he created a more functional, less expensive GPS collar. By 2008, they had one that could log GPS data every five minutes for more than a year and cost less than $500 each.
Clark began using the collars in a pilot wolf-cattle interaction study in central Idaho in 2005, to determine the effects of wolf presence on cattle range-use patterns. Part of the challenge of GPS collaring a wolf was getting the collar into a wolf-sized package. A cow can carry a fair amount of bulk and weight, but wolf collars had to be smaller and lighter.
The Oregon Beef Council (OBC) heard that Clark was using GPS collars to collect data and to address some research questions about the wolf-livestock issue in central Idaho. The OBC realized wolves would soon be coming into Oregon from Idaho and wanted to evaluate how this would impact rangeland cattle production in their state. The OBC asked Clark to extend the wolf-cattle interactions research he was doing in central Idaho to the border area of northeastern Oregon (where there were no wolves yet) and to western Idaho (where wolves were common). The proposal for the study was developed and submitted to OBC in 2007. The Oregon/Idaho Wolf-Cattle Interactions project began in 2008 with three study areas in western Idaho and three in eastern Oregon. Clark said:
We selected our Idaho study areas from the western part of the state where range cattle grazing is the dominant land use and where wolves were common. We searched for study areas in Oregon that had similar topography, vegetation types, soil types, cattle breeding, calf age at turn-out, grazing schedules, and so on.
This type of experimental design is called a BACIP (Before-After, Control-Impact, Paired) design. The Idaho study areas served as the Control, since wolves were already present. What would eventually change (and create impact) was wolf presence in Oregon. Wolves were expected to travel from Idaho into Oregon and establish packs in the Oregon study areas.
In Oregon, we wanted to collect at least a couple years of “Before” period data before wolves arrived in enough numbers to have a true impact, and then we could contrast these “Before” data to “After” period data collected after wolves set up shop in Oregon.
We put GPS collars on at least ten cows in each study area. Cow-calf herd sizes in these areas were 300 to 450 cows. The sixty-collar total sample size was limited by available funds from OBC.
The study was later expanded to include two more paired ranches, providing a large-enough sample size for adequate data to detect differences in cattle range use and other behaviors. GPS data tracks the location of collared cows and determines how fast they are traveling, enabling the researchers to classify cattle activity into resting, foraging, or traveling. Clark explains:
From this, we can calculate how much time a cow spends foraging during the day versus standing looking around or bedding. A hyper-vigilant animal will spend a lot of time standing and watching, rather than foraging, which could impact nutritional status. With GPS data collected every five minutes, we can detect changes such as increase in vigilant behavior and decreases in foraging time.
One of the Idaho study sites is the OX Ranch near Council, Idaho, managed by Casey Anderson, where data has been collected since 2008. This ranch experienced wolf depredation before the study started, but didn’t have documentation.
In 2009, we were able to confirm more of the wolf kills—eighteen animals—but were also missing five cows, two yearlings, one bull, and about seventy calves that were unaccounted for.
There were not many wolves in Oregon when the study began—just a few passing through and returning to Idaho. Within two years, however, the wolves coming from Idaho established packs in northeastern Oregon, and the study moved into the “After” design—comparing high wolf pressure with low wolf pressure (rather than no wolf pressure). “Having wolves and cows collared enables us to match up their location and time and to determine where and when wolf-cattle interactions are occurring,” says Clark. Data on wolf presence and activities is augmented by wolf scat sampling along forest roads and use of trail cameras.
Interesting Study Results
Even though only one wolf was collared in 2009, this gave some interesting results, said Clark:
We found interactions between all ten of the collared cows and that single GPS-collared wolf within a very extensive study area (over fifty thousand acres). The ten collared cows were dispersed throughout the landscape, part of the larger herd of 450 cow-calf pairs, yet the data showed this wolf was within five hundred yards of every one of the ten collared cows many times throughout the summer (for a total of 783 contacts).
The collared wolf’s area was 210 square miles with a fifty-five-mile perimeter. The least distance he traveled was about six miles per day, and the most, twenty-nine miles per day. “On a day of confirmed depredation, we could look back to the data and see that the wolf was in the immediate area at that same time,” he says. This wolf was a member of an eleven-wolf pack. There were three different packs, totaling thirty-four wolves, roaming that study area during 2009. The rancher on that study area suffered more than forty confirmed or probable wolf depredations.
The collared cow with the least number of interactions with the collared wolf had twenty-three interactions within five hundred yards during that grazing season. The cow with the most encounters with that wolf interacted 140 times over the course of 137 days (mid-June through early November 2009—when the collar was removed from the wolf to retrieve the data. All ten collared cows had interactions within 250 yards, and only one of the ten cows didn’t have interaction at a hundred yards or less. Envision 450 cows with more than thirty wolves moving among them. If one of those wolves had 783 encounters with just ten of those cows, think how many encounters there must have been by thirty wolves among the 450 cows; in other words, the cattle were constantly impacted by the presence of wolves. Two of the collared cows’ calves disappeared that summer. Clark said,
If the behavior of this wolf was representative of the larger local wolf population, it is easy to imagine that this cattle herd, and likely other neighboring herds, was exposed to an intensive wolf predation threat.
We wondered how many of these GPS-detected wolf-cattle interactions resulted in depredations, but we will never know. We did go back and look at the wolf GPS data and compare the tracking logs with locations of known 2009 depredation sites. We could see tight, spiral patterns in the wolf movements that occurred at those sites. These circling activities may illustrate prey-appraisal or pursuit events.
The following spring of 2010, we hiked into the sites where spiral patterns had occurred in the 2009 wolf log and inspected the sites, looking for signs of depredation, and found fresh cattle bones at one of those sites.
Rendezvous Sites
Certain areas are used by wolves to park their pups with a babysitter wolf while other members of the pack go back and forth on hunting excursions. Dave Ausband, a researcher with the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Montana, developed a wolf rendezvous prediction site model and, from that, created a predicted wolf rendezvous site map for Idaho. Clark said:
These rendezvous sites anchor the distribution patterns of the entire wolf pack to specific points. Out of curiosity, we plotted both our wolf GPS data and our cattle GPS data from one of our Idaho study areas onto Ausband’s map and found the clusters of concentrated wolf location data lined up with areas predicted on the map as being high quality wolf rendezvous site habitat. We wondered if the map and model could be used to predict where wolf-use patterns and cattle-use patterns frequently overlap—increasing the potential for wolf depredation.
Wolf rendezvous sites tend to be in grassy areas close to water—not necessarily riparian areas, but grassy meadows without a lot of overhead cover. These areas are also good foraging areas for cattle. Rendezvous site information could enable ranchers to be aware of certain danger areas and to check for signs of depredation in those areas. They might choose to not put cattle into those areas until later in the season when the pups are grown and the pack is not tied so closely to those sites.
Indirect Effects
Clark explained about the indirect effects of wolves upon cattle. “There was some earlier research done on death and injury losses due to wolf predation on cattle, indicating that these impacts are underestimated,” says Clark. Some cattle just disappear; a pack of wolves can consume an entire carcass overnight.
However, no one has researched the indirect effects of wolf presence on rangeland livestock production. These indirect effects may have much larger impacts on livestock producers than livestock death and injury losses to wolves. Indirect effects of wolves on livestock range-use patterns include impact on foraging efficiency, disposition, and stress levels.
These effects could cascade down to affect cattle diet quality, nutritional status, and disease susceptibility. Cascading further down, wolf presence may indirectly affect (and reduce) calf weaning weights and cow body condition in the fall and result in increased winter feeding costs, along with conception and pregnancy failures, increased veterinary care and supply costs, and death loss to disease. This complex cascade of effects could substantially impact a ranch’s bottom line.
Casey Anderson at the OX Ranch was weighing and assessing his cows when they were collared in the spring before turnout and again when they came off the range to be hauled down to winter pasture and the collars removed. “What we were seeing across the board in our herd was that the cows were coming home a full body score less than they had been in the past. With a mature cow, each score is about a hundred pounds,” he explains. This means extra feed costs to get them through the winter. “We were also seeing the conception rate plummet. With our herd health program and mineral and protein supplement, there was no reason for this other than the wolves. What normally would be 90 to 95 percent conception rate in our herd went down to as low as 82 percent,” says Anderson.
No Single Effect, But Significant Losses
Some of the direct impact went beyond actual kills; additional animals were severely maimed. “Although we spend a lot of time doctoring these and trying to save them, we end up with a bunch we can’t sell because they are crippled,” Anderson says. During the summer of 2012, he had nine calves with wolf bites in just one week. “The alpha female in the pack is using the calves to teach pups how to hunt. These injured calves may live, but you have to doctor them.” In addition, four young cows in the first calf-heifer group had big abscesses behind the shoulder and/or above the flank area, due to infected wolf bites.
Wolf depredation is generally not a single effect; it usually stimulates a change in cattle use patterns and different areas for grazing. “We are also seeing changes in the way cattle use the range. They are bunching up more against fences, and wolves are using the fences to corner them,” says Anderson.
This may be a shift from a high-quality foraging area to a low-quality foraging area just because cattle are worried about wolves as Clark explains:
Cattle may get up on an open hillside where they can see farther to detect if wolves are approaching, but the time of year they are doing this might be when the grass is so dried out it doesn’t have much protein—so cattle diet quality declines. Cattle under threat bunch up, standing in open areas where they feel safer, but these areas soon become dry and dusty from concentrated trampling, and the rising dust can lead to respiratory disorders—especially in stressed cattle that have become more vulnerable to disease.
If cattle are being bred on the range, as is the case for the majority of outfits raising commercial cattle, all these factors work toward decreasing the number of cows that get bred on time and increasing the number that end up breeding late or coming up open in the fall, according to Clark. Late calves change the uniformity of the calf crop, which adversely affects the price received for those calves, which is another financial impact. This may also affect the number and quality of replacement heifers a rancher is able to keep, and the future productivity of the herd is adversely affected.
There are also changes in cattle temperament. Clark explains:
In one of the central Idaho herds, a wolf followed cattle down to the calving areas, and the cows were very aggressive in trying to protect their newborn calves. The rancher couldn’t tag a calf without being attacked by the mother cow; he had to get the calf into the back of a pickup to safely do anything with it.
Anderson says that before wolves came, their cattle were all dog-broke and easy to work with dogs.
Now our cattle chase dogs; we can’t use dogs anymore to herd them. In this steep, rugged country, dogs have always been a good tool. Now it is extremely difficult to move cattle.
The OX Ranch calves in late May through June. The calves are branded when the cattle are gathered in the fall. “By that time, the calves are 350 to four hundred pounds, and when they come into the corral, they size you up and take you,” he says. They are totally focused on defending themselves, attacking a dog or a person. “This is not normal behavior. These cattle were all nice to handle before the wolves came. Now they attack anything that comes close to them,” says Anderson. He had a horse that had to be sold after it was run through a fence by wolves. Even though the horse’s injuries healed, it was no longer safe to have dogs near the horse as it would strike and kick at the dogs. Similarly, threatened, stressed cattle are unpredictable and often become more aggressive, especially when people are working on foot, but also in rangeland situations where ranchers are trying to herd them on horseback. If cows are prone to fight or take off and go through fences, this affects ranchers’ costs, and injury risk for ranch personnel also becomes an issue, as Clark explains:
There are more handling-related injuries to cattle that have been exposed to depredation threat, along with increased frequency of bunching and flight events. Handling flighty, nervous cattle may lead to more trampling deaths of small calves and broken legs in larger calves. Nervous cattle are more prone to chute-crashing, ramming fences, crawling up corral walls, and other flight-type behavior, which can result in spinal injuries, rendering the injured animals unmarketable.
Dr. John Williams (OSU Extension) says one of the purposes of this ten-year study is to try to understand how cattle react differently due to presence of wolves. “We are finding that cattle temperament changes drastically when they have to live with wolves,” says Williams.
This winter (2013) we hope to put collars on cattle, do blood tests on the ones that have been living among wolves, and compare their stress level (measuring cortisol levels in the blood) with cattle that have not been living with wolves. We know that cows are individuals, and some will be stressed more than others.
We want to find out how long this effect lasts. If we were able to measure the stress on a cow that is attacked, her cortisol level the next day would be very high. Our ranchers have been telling us that many of these cows’ changed behavior lasts for a while. In some cows, it becomes less pronounced, in some cows it disappears, and in others it does not.
Neil Rimbey, a range economist with University of Idaho, has been evaluating economic impact on ranches in the study, using economic models to assess the economic impact of management alternatives. The depredation loss (killed animals) is what gets attention, but the first years of this study have shown that indirect losses have more impact on ranch profitability and sustainability. Rimbey says:
A recent study in Wyoming indicated that ranchers are able to find only about one of every seven animals killed by wolves, so in Wyoming they are compensating ranchers on a one to seven basis. This research in Wyoming also suggests that some of the indirect losses—more open cows, reduction in weight gain on calves, more veterinary treatments for injured calves or for stressed calves that got pneumonia—should raise the compensation rate (from one to seven) up to one to thirteen or fourteen.
The change in cattle behavior in the presence of wolves impacts management. Cattle may not stay in the areas they are put—for instance, coming right back down off the mountains to try to get away from wolves. They may use some areas more heavily while avoiding others. Cattle also crash through fences and are harder to handle. Rimbey says:
The Oregon and Idaho ranchers have mentioned increase in time, labor, and costs associated with managing cattle. There’s more travel involved; they have to go more frequently to try to check cattle. There is also more time spent meeting with Fish and Wildlife Service to try to get confirmation on death loss, etc.
The study has confirmed things ranchers suspected regarding behavioral changes in cattle, and it will be interesting to see how the economic impacts calculate out.
For instance, each 1 percent change in the percentage of calves weaned in Idaho (using conservative prices) is amounting to about a $1,750 change in gross revenue, or nearly six dollars per cow . . . And this is just a starting point of this component of the project.
Wolf Threats to Humans
Casey Anderson at the OX Ranch says that when wolf numbers are controlled, they have a tendency to stay farther back in the high country. Anderson’s wife has found wolf tracks in fresh snow less than fifty feet from the house. Anderson says:
We’ve had wolves lie on the county road in the snow at night, watching cattle under a light at the end of the barn. You could see where the wolves had come down next to the corrals and were lying in the snow watching the cattle.
Data from the collared wolf showed how close these wolves are coming to homes and human activity. “We have several houses here on the ranch. The collared wolf came within five hundred yards of one house 307 times that summer,” says Anderson. The pack of twelve came within three hundred yards of the ranch lodge and spent all day there.
The people who take care of the lodge have three little boys. The wolves were there all day, right above the county road in a little clump of timber, and watched the lodge. We had proof because the collared wolf was there with them in what we call a rendezvous site.
Many ranchers are reluctant to be out doing routine tasks, such as hiking around their pastures fixing fences, without a gun. Says Jay Smith, a rancher near Carmen, Idaho:
This maneuver by our federal government is stealing from me, my children, and our future. It may destroy our livelihood, and our entire lifestyle is also in jeopardy. I have small children, and I like to take them with me to the hills when I check cattle or fences, and now it’s a risk.
Ralph McCrea near Leadore, Idaho, tells of one incident a few years ago when his grandchildren were sledding on the hill behind his house.
A couple hours later, I went out to check the cows and found a wolf standing in the herd, just forty yards from where the kids had been sledding. They had our old dog with them, and if the wolf had arrived a little sooner, it would have been attracted to that dog and the kids. We’re being pulled right back into the 1890s when everyone had to be armed to defend against predators.
Wolf advocates say that wolves are shy and stay away from people, but this is proving to be untrue. There have been increasing numbers of incidents the past dozen years in which wolves have threatened, attacked, or killed people. Wolf advocates try to discredit many of these stories, however, as they did an earlier attack of a vacationing family on a pack trip into the Middle Fork of the Salmon River when the wolves were still under full protection.
From Fishing Vacation to Nightmare
Tim and Diana Sundles, who lived on Carmen Creek near Salmon, Idaho, had taken their teenage sons into a remote area where they had been camping for many years. They had ridden the sixteen miles from the trailhead with their horses and mules and set up camp. Sundles recalled:
We woke up the next morning before daylight, hearing wolves howling and horses screaming. I ran out of the tent with a flashlight and small revolver, hollering and shooting into the air to run the wolves off. I assumed it was over, that the wolves were afraid and left. We cooked breakfast, sat around camp an hour or so, and then got our fishing gear ready to hike to one of those remote lakes to spend the day, leaving the horses and mules at our camp, with a couple of them turned loose to graze. I picked up my rifle as we started to walk out of camp and commented to my wife that I had an uneasy feeling.
We got about a hundred yards where two pack animals were grazing, and a big grey wolf was sneaking up on them. In the back of my mind, I was wondering where the rest of the pack was. I fired a shot over the wolf to scare it, and it turned on me. I didn’t know at the time it was the alpha male and radio-collared. When I fired the shot over it, the wolf came straight at me, full speed. I fired two more rounds, trying to hit it, but a wolf running at you through the trees is hard to hit!
The wolf came within ten feet of Sundles, then veered off, and circled around the family, possibly because he’d been shot in the foot, as Sundles discovered later, looking at the body.
But he didn’t act lame or even slow down. He turned toward my wife on the trail behind me, and I finally had a good broadside shot and killed the wolf. It dropped about ten feet from my wife. Then I saw the radio collar and ear tags and realized our vacation was over.
Sundles went home and tried to find an attorney familiar with the ESA but had no luck.
The law said you’ve got to report the shooting of a wolf within twenty-four hours, but it took us forty-eight hours to get out of the wilderness so I was already in violation of the law by the time I found out about it.
Sundles was going to keep quiet about shooting the wolf, because of the heavy penalty involved, but then a few weeks later decided to tell people—at a public meeting in Salmon that August when US Senator Mike Crapo was holding a hearing to get local input about delisting the wolves. Sundles said:
If the wolf attack happened to us, it could happen to anyone, and I felt the public needed to know that wolves can be dangerous. One of the big lies the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the environmentalists are telling us is that wolves are not dangerous to humans. If I kept quiet, the next time it might be a little kid, and then I would have felt partly responsible. Here we were, on vacation, suddenly thrust into this situation, and now I’m feeling guilty! A lot of folks who are out camping or fishing don’t have a gun. If I had not picked up my rifle when we headed out from camp, we would have had a serious problem!
Protected
Wolf packs in Washington are on the rise, migrating in from Idaho, Oregon, and Canada, preying on livestock and game herds. Ranchers in northeastern Washington have been especially hard hit. Len McIrvin, his son Bill, and grandson Justin, who run Hereford cattle on their Diamond M Ranch, have suffered alarming losses, as Len explains:
We had wolf damage starting a few years ago, but not this severe. In 2011, we had sixteen head killed; in 2012, it was forty head. One of our herds on Forest Service land and another herd of 350 on our private land took the brunt of it.
Wolves are efficient killing machines. It’s easy for them to take down mature cattle.
In 2011, we had five bulls lost to wolves on our range. In the fall after breeding season is over, they tend to go off by themselves and are easy targets for a pack of wolves. When wolves find one bull by himself, he doesn’t have a chance. Though most of the time they rip the animal open, we’ve had many calves killed that they never took a bite of. They sometimes just chew him up to kill him, and once their plaything is dead or dying, they go on to the next, like a cat playing with a mouse. For a long time, our Fish and Wildlife people refused to believe that wolves were killing those calves. You don’t see any blood when a cat kills a mouse, and it’s the same with these calves; they are mauled to death.
There may be a few scratch marks on the hide from their teeth and sometimes no marks at all, but often there’s no open wound—just a lot of bruising and internal bleeding. The McIrvins found one five-hundred-pound calf dead and couldn’t find a mark on it.
We hesitated to call Fish & Wildlife, but we did, and when they opened that calf up to do a necropsy, they saw the muscles under the skin were pulverized, like hamburger. The calf died of internal injuries.
NAR-Wolves
Then there’s the problem of relocated wolves, wolves already in the habit of killing livestock, as Len explains:
Wolves are showing up in every little hamlet and community, but it’s scientifically impossible for this many breeding pairs of wolves to crop up simultaneously in an area two hundred miles by two hundred miles. These wolves are suddenly everywhere. The Fish & Game call them NAR-wolves—non-authorized release. One group of wolves in our area has been particularly aggressive on cattle, and I have a feeling they are problem wolves that were gathered up from somewhere else and dumped out here.
Even though wolves have been delisted in the wolf management areas in Idaho, Montana, and eastern Washington, the state of Washington is still protecting them; it is illegal for a Washington rancher to shoot one. Len said:
The eastern third of Washington is part of the Rocky Mountain Management Area where the Feds delisted wolves, but Washington State made them stay endangered, with all the ramifications of federal protection.
And in the western two-thirds of the state, the wolves are still on the federal endangered list, which causes its own set of problems, as explained by Len:
We had help from the State Senate and House of Representatives as we were dealing with our depredation problem, and the county sheriff was there for every kill we found, documenting it. The county commissioners were there, and we got a lot of press from our local newspaper and radio station. The US Fish and Wildlife finally had to recognize the problem and made the decision to eliminate this pack of eight wolves. They killed some, but didn’t get them all, and there are plenty of other wolves.
We have very little game left. The only deer and elk we see now are in our back yards. Mule deer that are usually in the high country spent this past summer in our hayfields and pastures by the house. The same thing has been happening in Idaho the past dozen years; elk and deer have been coming down out of the mountains to take refuge on private land, amongst the cattle, and congregating in populated areas.
We try to keep our cattle up high in the good feed on summer range, and the wolves run them right back down to the bottom fences. Even if we make an eight-mile drive one day to take cattle back up, the next day they are down again.
This makes it hard to manage a range. The Forest Service people are not happy if cattle are spending the summer down in the riparian areas, but when wolves keep harassing them, the cattle won’t stay in the high country. Len stated:
Ranchers in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming have been having wolf problems for nearly twenty years, but it’s fairly new here—within the last five years. One of our neighbors runs about eighty cattle. The first seventeen cows he brought home from the range last fall had only two calves with them. The other fifteen calves were almost certainly killed by wolves during the summer. His losses are horrific and will probably put him out of business.
The winter before, wolves harassed that rancher’s cows all winter; he finally fenced them into a two-acre pasture next to his house and barn. At that point the wolves hadn’t killed any yet, but the cows had trampled several newborn calves when they were upset by wolves. “I’ve estimated our loss last year at about a hundred thousand dollars but it’s hard to know exactly what it is,” says Len. Losses go far beyond actual kills, when injuries, weight loss, and lower conception rates in the herd are taken into consideration.
Cattlemen in eastern Washington have tried using non-lethal means to scare off wolves, but these methods haven’t worked. Ranchers in Washington are hoping for delisting of wolves as an endangered species before another problem pack has to be removed at taxpayer expense. There are at least seven or eight other packs in this three-county area. If ranchers could be allowed to address wolf depredation as they address other predator issues, major problems could be minimized.
Political Pawns?
Len McIrvin said:
My son Bill went to the state capitol in Olympia and testified on the wolf issue. He said the room was full—more than five hundred people, predominantly women—and he could feel their hatred. They were screaming at him and crying.
They really believe that wolves are harmless and that ranchers are evil in trying to control them. Len recently saw an elementary school assignment, given by a teacher in the Colville School District north of Spokane, Washington.
This was a class assignment paper for third graders to fill out. It was titled “The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig: Building Vocabulary.” The students were to fill in the blanks in these sentences: “The three little wolves look soft and _____________. In order to sneak up on the wolves, the Big Bad Pig came prowling through the trees. The Big Bad Pig grunted because he was big and bad. The wolves were scared and began trembling. Each time one of their houses crumbled, the wolves were determined to build a better one.
We grew up with the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs, and this example is a total turn-around. It’s a warped mentality that would come up with this for a third grade worksheet in public school.
He feels the wolf introduction into the western United States and their protection is NOT about the wolves. It’s about depopulating the West.
There are many people—including some high up the government—who want a ninety-mile corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon (Y to Y) for wildlife. They have an agenda, and wolves are part of the plan. Ranchers don’t have much say in these issues; all of agriculture is less than 2 percent of the population in this country. All we do is feed the world, but most people don’t care about that.
Before the wolf plan was finalized in Washington State, I was in a meeting and asked the Fish and Wildlife person, ‘If I go home tonight and see a wolf pulling down a cow, can I shoot the wolf?’
They said, ‘Absolutely not, unless you want to pay a fifty thousand dollar fine, spend ten years in jail, be a felon the rest of your life, and never be allowed to own a gun.’ By contrast, if I was sitting at home and someone knocked a window out with a baseball bat and came in after me, can I shoot him? They said, ‘Absolutely! That’s your Constitutional right! You can shoot a human in self-defense, but you can’t shoot a wolf that’s killing your animals.’
They told us that, if they find a dead wolf in our area, they would have a complete investigation. Every firearm the rancher and crew own would be confiscated until ballistic tests had been run. By contrast, right across the state line in Idaho, it’s legal to shoot wolves that are harassing or killing cattle, and anyone can buy a wolf tag for the wolf hunting season.
We’ve had a lot of damage this year, yet we’ve only seen the wolves a couple times and never had a chance to get a shot. It was usually a brief glimpse in the headlights of a vehicle in the middle of the night or when we didn’t have a gun.
The wolf problem will make ranching very tough, especially in areas like Washington and northern Idaho where there’s a lot of timber for them to hide in. It’s a little easier to hunt them in open areas like eastern Montana. However, it’s impossible to keep wolves under control just by hunting them. Idaho’s first wolf hunt was a perfect example. Everyone thought it would be great, and the Fish & Game Department sold thousands of tags but it was unable to fill the quotas. Lots of people were eager to shoot a wolf. The hunters bought tags thinking they could shoot a wolf when they were out hunting deer and elk. But they didn’t get much opportunity because wolves are elusive. Now the novelty of hunting them has passed, and the wolves are still expanding. In Idaho, the Fish & Game Department can’t begin to keep up with the natural population increase.
Cattle and wolves are never going to be compatible. Some people keep saying that wildlife people and cattlemen are going to have to learn to manage for wolves, but that’s impossible. It’s hard to “manage” when you are always on the losing end.
Ranchers have always had challenges, explained Len:
We’ve fought cougars, bears, and coyotes killing baby calves, but those problems were nothing compared to wolf depredation. And this has become a political thing. Our state Wildlife Commission says they’ve had ten thousand e-mails from people who want wolves and only a few from people who don’t. They forget that we have a Constitutional right to defend our property. But the Wildlife Commission is swayed by the mob, and there goes our rights.
There were always plenty of wolves in Minnesota, Canada, and Alaska (at least fifty thousand to sixty thousand in Canada). They were never endangered. Now Alaska is in trouble because wolves have decimated wildlife in many areas. The state was going to start eradicating wolves with planes and helicopters. Then environmental groups and wolf advocates started a boycott on tourism, and Alaska backed down. The wolf is now the spotted owl for the ranching industry.
Conclusion
Even though the wolf was finally delisted, there are still political agendas at hand, and certain elements are fighting for continued protection. Some people believe the wolf issue is a ploy to eventually do away with hunting (since, theoretically, wolves can keep game numbers in check without human management) and then our guns.
Laws that supersede our other laws and rights, such as property rights and the right to protect one’s family and animals, are dangerous. There is growing concern among many Westerners, especially ranchers, that the wolf, like the spotted owl, is being used to put unacceptable restrictions on land use, both public and private. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a dangerous law. Few laws have been so divisive or driven by such emotional forces. The ESA is being used by preservationists and pseudo-environmentalists to lock up natural resources and halt logging, mining, grazing, and traditional use of private property.
Hero worship puts movie stars, sports, and music superstars in a league of their own, untarnished by their actual failings and foibles. Wolves have come to hold that same god-like status, despite the realities of what living with them is really like.
“Historical and current evidence indicates that one can co-exist with wolves where such are severely limited in numbers on an ongoing basis so that there is continually a buffer of wild prey and livestock between wolves and humans, with an ongoing removal of all wolves habituating to people and domestic animals. The current notion that wolves can be made to co-exist with people in settled landscapes is not tenable.”
—Dr. Valerius Geist