Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Idaho Wolf Management Remains Contentious

http://www.capitalpress.com/Idaho/20180201/idaho-ranchers-live-with-wolves

Time hasn’t healed raw nerves created by predator’s reintroduction in Idaho.

BOISE — Most ranchers and farmers were howling mad when the federal government announced plans to reintroduce wolves in Idaho starting in 1995.

During standing-room-only public hearings on bringing the predators back to the state, “Almost to a person, rural Idaho said, ‘We don’t want wolves here,’” said Idaho Farm Bureau Federation spokesman John Thompson. “The federal government completely disregarded what those people in rural areas said.”

Twenty-three years later, that bitterness still remains — and so does the debate — over bringing wolves to Idaho.

The initial 35 gray wolves released during 1995 and 1996 in central Idaho came from Alberta, Canada. More wolves were also released to the east in Yellowstone National Park.

At first, Idaho wolf numbers skyrocketed, peaking at an estimated 856 in 2009 before subsiding to the current 700. In the meantime, the number of wolf depredations of livestock has also stabilized.

To some, the state has reach something of an equilibrium in regard to wolf numbers and their impact on livestock and wildlife.

Rancher Wyatt Prescott, former executive vice president of the Idaho Cattle Association, said that, all things considered, the state is doing a pretty good job of managing the predators, and the stable population and depredation numbers show that.

“We’re in a good spot,” he said. “But we still need to remain active in managing wolves that are taking out livestock.”

But those at ground zero — producers who continue to lose animals to the predators — feel very differently about wolves.

“You’re not in a good place if you’re producing the livestock they are killing,” said Richard Savage, a past president of the cattle association. He ranches in Clark County, near the Montana border in Eastern Idaho. “That’s still a major concern.”

Congress took wolves in Idaho off the federal endangered species list in 2011. The state then assumed management of the animals from the federal government for a five-year probationary period. In 2017, the state assumed full management of wolves without federal oversight.

Idaho stopped estimating its wolf population after 2015, when the population was about 786. It had varied between 681 and 786 from the years 2010 to 2015.

“Based on the trend between 2010 and 2015, I’d say the population remains within that range,” said Idaho Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist Jim Hayden, who manages the wolf program. Idaho now manages wolves based on the total number of packs — 108 — using a network of trail cameras across the state to monitor them.


More wolves


Some livestock producers believe the wolf population is much higher than the estimate.

Wilder, Idaho, sheep rancher Frank Shirts said wolves in the hills howl around his sheep every night.

“They have way more wolves than they think they have,” he said at his ranch 40 miles west of Boise. “If the men aren’t with the sheep 24 hours a day, wolves are going to be in there because they’re everywhere....”

The Farm Bureau’s Thompson agrees.

“I don’t think people realize they’re all around us,” he said. “They’re in the Boise foothills. They’re everywhere that coyotes are.”

Idaho’s wolf population had been growing at about 28 percent a year and peaked at about 856 in 2009. But that trend stopped once the state began a wolf hunting season for part of 2009 and then resumed it in 2011 after a lawsuit temporarily halted it.

Idaho hunters have harvested between 205 and 358 wolves annually since 2012. About 62,000 wolf hunting tags are purchased each year.


Impact of hunting


Hunting has “absolutely had an impact,” said Todd Grimm, the Idaho director of Wildlife Services, a USDA agency that resolves conflicts between humans and animals.

“When sportsmen and trappers are able to remove (up to) 350 wolves a year, it stops wolves from overpopulating in those areas and spilling over into the agricultural areas,” Grimm said.

But not everyone supports hunting wolves. Defenders of Wildlife is one of the conservation groups that has been most active in supporting the animals’ return to Idaho.

The organization advocates non-lethal control methods to keep wolves away from livestock and believes the evidence shows that it reduces livestock depredations in the long-term, said Suzanne Stone, the group’s regional director.

“Lethal control can cause more livestock losses long-term than using non-lethal control methods,” she said. “If your goal is to minimize livestock depredations, then you need non-lethal methods to do that.”

Thompson said non-lethal methods are expensive and have never been proven to be effective.

“I think that’s a load of crap,” he said about the assertion non-lethal control works better than lethal control for problem wolves.


Attacks add up


Since wolves were reintroduced in Idaho in 1995, 396 livestock producers have reported confirmed wolf depredations, according to Wildlife Services.

The agency has conducted more than 2,150 wolf depredation investigations since 1995 and confirmed more than 1,400 attacks on livestock and domestic animals. Confirmed and probable wolf kills of livestock and domestic animals since then include 4,068 sheep, 1,055 cattle, 102 dogs, 10 horses and one bison, according to Wildlife Services.

That doesn’t include hundreds more animals that were injured by wolves.

And it doesn’t include other losses that ranchers believe are due to wolves but that they can’t prove, partly because the animals can’t be found, said Shirts, who estimates he has lost 300 sheep to wolves. Most of those are unconfirmed.

Shirts also says the pounds that his lambs don’t put on due to the presence of wolves is where he takes the biggest financial hit. He estimates harassment by wolves makes his average lamb eight pounds lighter. At $1.50 a pound, that’s about $12 a lamb — and he runs 15,000 lambs a year.

“Weight gain losses are costing me a couple hundred thousand dollars a year,” he said.

Stone, of the Defenders of Wildlife, maintains that “there is no proof that wolves being present causes weight loss in livestock.”

Given the total number of livestock that die for other reasons such as illness, Idaho’s wolf depredation numbers are minimal, Stone said. “We’ve never had a large number of livestock lost to wolves in Idaho.”

She said her group ”would like to see more wolves out there and have them less harassed than they are now.”

“I think Idaho is still heavy-handed when it comes to wolves and has a lot to learn,” Stone said. “We’re hopeful Idaho will learn to live with wolves and let go of some of these archaic killing programs and work on improving their management.”

Ranchers directly impacted by the animals have a far different take. Most would prefer the state take more lethal control actions.


‘We’re paying’


“There are a lot of wolves in Idaho,” said Cascade, Idaho, cattle rancher Phil Davis, who has had more than 60 confirmed cattle losses due to wolves. “We have to use every tool we have available to us to keep the numbers at an acceptable level.”

Shirts said pro-wolf advocates have no skin in the game and don’t feel the pain the producers do.

“These people that want to hear them howl, they’re not paying anything for that,” he said. “We’re the ones paying for it. How would they feel if someone was sneaking into their house and eating the groceries out of their house every day?”

Ranchers are indemnified for livestock that is confirmed as killed by wolves, but it doesn’t make up for the added time, effort and expenses of dealing with the predators, the lost weight in livestock or the losses that can’t be confirmed as wolf kills, they said.

Dustin Miller, who manages the Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation, said the state will always maintain a robust population of wolves to prevent the federal government from putting them back on the endangered species list, but it will also continue to respond to problem wolves and the concerns of the livestock community.

Idaho is now “managing wolves ourselves and we intend to keep it that way,” Gov. Butch Otter, a rancher, told Capital Press in an email.

“With more than 700 of the big carnivores now roaming our state, Idaho wildlife managers are working full-time to ensure wolf numbers stay above recovery thresholds while aggressively removing those that prey on livestock and weaken our deer and elk herds,” Otter said.

One of the areas of contention is the fact that it wasn't a "reintroduction" at all. It was an introduction of a larger, more voracious sub species of Canadian wolves.

They could non-lethally relocate one to each of these hippie’s living room.... I’m sure they’d love to have a sweet furry creature so close.

Just do a little arithmetic and figure what it costs to feed 700 big bad killer dogs a year when those dogs do not finish a kill but instead move on to fresher food leaving the old one behind for scavengers. Then double that figure for the real number of wolves. Also, you reckon the wolves prefer fleet footed elk and deer or slow sheep and cattle? Of course I am sure there is nothing out there that they can't take down and kill. This is crazy and if it were me I would do whatever it took.

F u c k the feds. Kill them all.

This isn't the case.Wolves from Alberta don't know where the Montana line is. They routinely go back and forth.A wolf collared near Calgary, AB, a few years ago travelled nearly 500 miles south over the course of a coup!e months He had a GPS collar that gave his location every 12 hours,and it was plotted on the map. He finally settled near Helena , and found a mate. The next year they had pups and began killing cattle. We then killed the group. I have looked up weight, length, and pictures of the original wolves removed from the west in the late 1800's and early 1900's. They are very close to the size and weight of the wolves we have now. A number of wolves col!ared in montana have been killed in Canada. They simply go back and forth. These are not the bigger arctic wolves( only slightly bigger). No real change in size between the average wolf in Alberta and the ones in Montana. That is a conspiracy theory.

I've said that many times here on the Fire. We had a smaller native species of wolf. Under both the Lacey Act and the ESA, they should have been protected. The introduction violated both laws and now the natives are extinct. They have been either killed or bred out of existence.

One wolf kills 15-22 elk per year. Multiplied by 700.

Fixed it for you...they don't just kill elk.

They kill about anything. grouse, deer, antelope, you name it. I've even heard of them killing bears.

Ever since the release of the Alberta wolves in 1995, in central ID, I've heard the talk about this supposed smaller variety of native wolves and how the Alberta wolves wiped them out.... Funny thing is there was never any pictures old or new, carcasses, shootings, trappings, etc.. of these miniature wolves prior to the release.

My family has lived in the north-central part of the state for 140 years and I never heard any stories handed down of small wolves being killed. I've covered lots of central-ID chasing lions before the 1995 release and never saw evidence of small wolves or even possible tracks. I've never heard from any other houndsmen, many who have covered way more country and days on the chase than me, say they ran across these small wolves either, prior to the release. Winter conditions and snow covered ground gives you a pretty good idea of what is roaming around the hills.

I just find the stories about the small-native wolf that ate only rabbits, mice, and squirrels, but left deer and elk alone kinda hard to believe. But I've had 20 year-old kids tell me about how the Canadian wolves wiped out our smaller variety. Some of those kids weren't even born when the Canadian wolves were let go.

I know there were wolves that occasionally wandered into Idaho from NW Montana and Glacier Park before 1995 and the Idaho F&G knew this also because it made big news at the time.

So anybody got some pictures from back in the day of these smaller Idaho wolves that are said to be native?

They weren't miniature by any means, just not as big as the grays. Their tracks were 3-4" wide. They'd kill deer and elk but their numbers stayed low. My son and I watched 2 of them running a calf elk about a year before the 1st introduction and I'd seen tracks before that. That was near Stanley. They were definitely here.

Seems odd that the numbers of "native wolves" stayed low for decades when the Alberta transplants simply exploded in numbers in a few years? Like I said, I sure have never seen any old pics or heard any solid claims of anybody killing one prior to 1995. And if you turn back the clock to the 1950's and 60's, most predators had bounties and were killed year round.

I'm having a hard time buying into the argument that Idaho had a resident population of different wolves (just slightly smaller) and are now extinct due to the bigger wolves from across the border being let loose. IF&G has wolf pics from aerial winter surveys, in the early 1990's of a collared wolf and its mate that came into ID from southern Canada and the Glacier park area. Likely other Canadian wolves wandered in and out of the state also.

IF&G has always said that more than likely wolves would have repopulated Idaho at some point due to wolves wandering south from Canada into WA, ID, and MT. I've never heard any solid evidence that supports this slightly smaller wolf being different than the ones just across the our northern border. Mostly just claims to vague sightings and no real evidence.

It didn’t need fixin. This is the estimate, by wildlife biologists in the state of Montana, of the number of ELK killed per wolf per year. Elk are primary prey for wolves and if available in large numbers they will be first on the menu. Of course wolves also dine on every other animal in the ecosystem, but the numbers aren’t reflected here.

9 lbs of meat per wolf per day as an average. It will be the most of whatever is available. In central, and southern Montana, it is mostly elk. In northern Montana, its mostly whitetails, because that is what they have the most of. In Minnesota the wolves actually eat a lot of beaver for the very same reason. The1 exception that I see is the bison in yellow stone. Wolves haven't put much of a dent in them. I wish they would. I would like t see the leaf lickers squirm between their beloved bison, and their beloved wolf.

Feds or wolves?

They would choose the wolf.

I saw what I saw. There's no doubt that there were wolves her prior to the introduction. I can't explain why the numbers stayed so low for so long. There were no wolf bounties or hunting which would explain why you didn't see dead wolf photos.
There are numerous subspecies of wolves but they all interbreed freely if they have the chance. A subspecies is sort of like a breed in dogs. There are differences but they're still dogs.

We're talking about Idaho here.....
Conspiracy theory my ass!

The wolves from Montana travel freely back and forth from Idaho, and VI's versa. Wolves collared in Idaho have been killed in Montana many times. They travel long and far, and do t know where the state lines are. The wolves in both states are the same size and weight. And yes the bigger wolf montra is a conspiracy theory.