Struggle for Wolf "Balance"
who gets to decide the definition of it?
By Eve Byron
WISDOM - Loren Giem's ranch manager, Ken Wigen, first heard the howling Sept. 20 near their pasture in the Big Hole River valley.
The wolves' chorus made the hair on the back of Wigen's neck stand up. His dogs went nuts. Giem was nervous. But like his father and grandfather before him, Giem is a rancher and had almost a thousand head of Black Angus cows to rotate through four of the five pastures they use on 20,000 acres here. Most of this land is Giem family land, bought throughout the years since his grandfather moved here in the early 1900s.
"We put the cattle in that pasture and three others," Giem said last week, waving toward the rolling sagebrush hills that flow into heavy timber. "Within three or four days, Ken told me there was a problem up there." That "problem" is one many of Montana's ranchers now face, as wolves become established in the West. They were eliminated from the landscape around the time Giem's grandfather moved here, but almost 15 years after they were reintroduced in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park, more than 360 wolves roam Montana in 74 packs. An estimated 1,500 are scattered throughout the Rockies.
Giem's a lanky, chatty father of two with salt-and-pepper curly hair peeking out underneath his baseball cap. He earned an engineering degree in the early 1970s, and moved east for a few years, returning to Montana with his wife, Carol, to take up the family business. He hopes to someday pass the ranch onto his children and watch his grandchildren learn to rope and brand.
This week, slowly bouncing his Dodge truck east down the ranch road toward his pastures, Giem points out the rear window at the Pintler mountain range, where Idaho and Montana meet. Up ahead, in a corner of one of his pastures about a mile off the main road, the sagebrush is trampled into dirt and the fence is pushed outward.
"The cattle were balled up on the fence. We were sure we had wolf activity," Giem recalled.
They called Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks' wolf management program, looking for advice, and a site visit turned up wolf tracks. Three days later, on Oct. 9, Wigen found the first dead mature cow. A government trapper, Graeme McDougal with the federal Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, confirmed wolves took it down.
"Numerous wolf tracks, various sizes indicated a pack, i.e. adults with YOY (young of year) at carcass and immediate area," McDougal wrote in his report. "Torn and uprooted sagebrush, several areas of blood indicate a struggle, attack, of approximately 30 yards in length.
"Canine marks present on external surface of hide on left front elbow region and right rear above fetlock Hindquarters and internal organs totally gone from feeding and scavenging. All signs consistent with wolf predation." Less than two weeks later, Giem had lost five more cows to wolves, and one was seriously injured.
Giem isn't the only rancher who has lost livestock to wolves this year. Since April 15, when the newly formed Montana Livestock Loss Reduction and Mitigation Board started compensating people for ranch animals killed by wolves, the state has paid out $79,270 for 213 claims. That includes: 61 head of cattle; 145 sheep and goats; a registered, full-grown roping horse; and two guard dogs. At least four llamas also were killed by wolves and submitted for reimbursement because they were guard animals, but the board decided they didn't fit the definition of livestock covered under the reimbursement program.
In the past decade, a nonprofit organization that compensates ranchers for losses because of wolves noted that at least 1,140 cattle, 2,100 sheep and about 100 other animals including horses, mules, goats, llamas and livestock guard dogs have been killed in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The Defenders of Wildlife has paid out $1.1 million for those animals, in an attempt to shift economic responsibility for wolf recovery from individual ranch-ers to the millions of people who want to see wolf populations restored in the West.
Sometimes, the wolves hit a ranch here and there. But other times, as in Giem's case, they're repeat offenders.
In one reported situation, wolves killed 90 sheep last spring on a ranch near Dillon, including 32 thoroughbred Rambouillet rams in three separate instances. In September, FWP reported 15 sheep had died in five incidents on one Reed Point Ranch in a month's stretch. In July, wolves killed two llamas and injured a third, which had to be euthanized, near Florence.
"We seemed to have three regions where they hit hard - Hot Springs (on the Flathead Reser-vation), near Hall and Drummond, and near Dillon," noted George Edwards, livestock-loss-mitigation coordinator for the state Department of Livestock. "Now there's a fourth area - Reed Point near Billings. They've been losing a lot of sheep there." Even if the ranchers are compensated for the cow or sheep, the price paid doesn't take into account other costs to livestock producers. Giem will get about $5,000 for the six dead cows. But he moved the rest of his cattle out of his pastures 10 days early, at a cost of about $2,000 per day in hay. His dead cows probably were pregnant, so he's also out six calves. The harassment by wolves and ensuing stampedes by his cattle, which have pushed through a couple fences, probably prompted some to abort and definitely caused them to lose weight, Giem said.
"These are my replacement heifers; they're the most important thing that we do every year. They're critical, and those animals were tortured," Giem said. "Next spring, I'm going to have about 425 cow/calf pairs to put up here, and just imagine what's going to happen if the wolves come around. The cattle will go nuts, push through fences, and the babies are going to get trampled." Carolyn Sime, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks statewide wolf coordinator, said she under-stands the frustration and anger ranchers have regarding their losses. Her agency tries to work with ranchers to use a variety of tactics, from range riders to "flandry" - flagging on electric fences - to help protect livestock. When predation occurs, the preferred course of action is to collar the wolves to track their movements, but Sime isn't averse to issuing "shoot on sight" orders for repeat offenders.
"I know it would sound hollow to say I share their frustration and I'm sorry, but it's true," Sime said. "The reality, though, is life is fundamentally different now. These are very real im-pacts on very real people with the restored wolf program "But to be brutally honest, our country and society has evolved into a world where we really value wildlife. Montana is one place in the lower 48 states where we can have wolves and grizzly bears. Our society wants big things with big teeth, and that's happened here. Yet this is their (the ranchers') land. We're trying to take a problem-solving approach." Sime acknowledges that the ranchers are impacted by wolves, and she lies awake some nights trying to figure out how to solve some of the tough livestock/wolf conflicts like Giem is experiencing.
"I rack my brain trying to figure out how we can come up with new tools or new strategies or find new funding so this producer can hire an extra hand or something," Sime said. "But there are times when our hands are absolutely tied, which is where some of my frustration comes in. We're wanting to help but not able to do much." Giem's been issued two shoot-on-sight permits, which are good for 45 days. He notes, though, that McDougal has flown the area regularly and hasn't seen a wolf yet. Wigen caught a glimpse of one, but it high-tailed out of the area once it was spotted.
"So what good are the permits if you can't find (the wolves)?" Giem asked. "The wolves come out of the forest at night, hit my cows, then go back into the timber in the morning. They're edu-cated wolves now; they've been trapped and shot at, and know to hide when they hear the plane's motors." He adds that range riders aren't much help because of the timber and the total acres involved. Plus, with the wolves operating under the cover of darkness, they're even more difficult to find.
Still, Giem is pushing for eradication of the pack.
That's always an option, although not the first choice, Sime said. More than 60 wolves have been killed this year, mainly due to livestock predation.
"This is one of those worst-case scenarios. We haven't had one like this for a while," Sime said. "It's important to realize we're not going back to the days of no wolves, but clearly in the man-agement arena, lethal means are needed to address chronic wildlife losses." Reporter Eve Byron: 447-4076 or eve.byron@helenair.com
Reader Comments:
Mechanic390 wrote on Nov 24, 2008 7:59 AM:
" Elk and Deer harvests and numbers are down to record lows, Cattle are being killed, dogs are being attacked and dragged from porches to their excruciating death... Why? So a few idiots from Ca. or N.Y. can believe they might hear a Wolf howl at night while they drive through on I-90???
I'd like to know how many tax dollars have been spent on Wolf related activities, so the Wolves can rob us of our wildlife, cattle, pets, and ranchers' livelihoods. There's something wrong when priority is given to a hippy with the dream of hearing a howl over common sense and feeding our families!! "
