State wildlife officials take too long to authorize the killing of problem wolves, ranchers and others said Friday at a meeting of the agency oversight committee of the Environmental Quality Council.
"It's like a guy's robbing a bank and you have to go get an arrest warrant," said committee member Sen. Jim Shockley, R-Victor. "It doesn't make a lot of sense."
I have no experience yet, I repeat yet, on this issue so i don't know. It wouldn't surprise me though. Just reading the article it sounds like the State officials want to make sure of the situation before they go killing wolves to protect themselves from the Feds taking wolf control back over. Typical government cover your ass type reaction. Be afraid to make a decision because somebody might get mad at you and say you did something wrong. I would be upset to if I was losing stock and the state officials were hemming and hawing and not doing anything. Typical government mess.
Another story talks about the affects the wolves have on stock themselves and on their weight gain while on pasture.
Consequences of the federal wolf reintroduction program in the Northern Rockies may be visible on the dinner table soon, in the form of skimpier lamb chops and porterhouse steaks that expose more bone than beef.
For years, cattle ranchers and wool growers have fretted over wolves that kill dozens of cows and sheep each year. But the steepest price may be the declining weight of livestock terrified by the howls and footsteps of the stalking predators.
Currently, calves fetch $1.45 per pound on the market. So if wolves cause just a few lost pounds on each head of cattle, that quickly mounts into big losses, said Lloyd Knight, the executive director of the Idaho Cattle Association.
"When the cows are scared, they bunch together, they don't spread out like they're used to. They don't eat and drink - you can just tell they're losing weight," he said. "The loss of weight from the whole herd could cost far more than the depredation of a few calves. It's something we've been afraid of since the reintroduction program began."
Now I've never heard of this concern before with wolves returning to livestock areas. I am not an expert on these things so I won't even begin to say for sure. Are the ranchers just blowing smoke or is there something to it? It would be interesting to know more information on this. I'm assuming that this is just like any other story a person hears, there is a partial truth to it. There might be an affect on livestock weight gain but the article overstates it. With the ranching business every dollar lost hurts so I can see why the ranchers are complaining. I mean really, the opening paragraph is a little overstated since not all meat comes from the area where wolves presently are, I know they keep moving further out, so not all critters are affected at this time so I don't know how a consumer will notice "skimpier lamb chops and porterhouse steaks." A little overstated. More information would be of interest.
For the record, I don't like the wolf return to the area. It has not effected my cattle operation yet but I know it will. Sensible procedures on how to deal with them and their removal from the Endangered Species list is necessary for Ranchers to protect their livelihood from this animal. The sooner these things are done the better. I'll keep watching and praying that wolves don't end up around here but I know better. The day is coming and I dread it.
With an animal like elk people sell the hunting rights to help pay for the costs of grazing. I don't think there would be that big of market for a wolf hunt to pay the costs. Another problem I see is containing the wolf. The wolves cover a lot of range so it would take a large group of ranchers to get together and all allow it for some mythical, unexplained benefit to us all. Believe me getting a bunch of ranchers to work together like that would be difficult.
You say this idea has been used before. An example of this idea being used in conjunction with a predator would be helpful. I know its been used with prey type critters but not aware of it being used with predators.
Bonnie really hits the nail on the head. How do you measure your loss. Any payment for loss is going to fail because the rancher will always feel he is sustaining more loss than some payment agency is willing to pay.
I don't see any way the wolf is going to be welcomed by the ranching community. It to much affects our lively hood.
WHO is going to pay for it? Say a rancher is short 10 head of calves when he weans. If the calves weight 500# each, and he is contracted for $1.30 per pound, that is $6500.00 that he has lost. Maybe he can jump through enough hoops and mess with enough red tape to get some of that back, lots of times not. How does a wolf become a ranch product?
According to the USDA, predators account for $71 million in livestock losses every year across America, the majority from predation by coyotes. It is highly unlikely that the tide of nationwide opinion will turn toward somehow putting the wolf reintroduction genie back in the bottle, setting up what seems like an inevitable conflict between those who want wolves but do not suffer the costs of having them and those who do not want them and do. I'm looking for an alternative to this failed pattern.
Any predator compensation scheme, even one spun "positively" to define wolves as ranch products, comes at a cost in time, red tape and aggrevation for the rancher. Those are real costs, and costs I freely admit I am not the right person to quantify. It is not, after all, my livelihood at risk.
The idea behind placing a real and tangible value on rare species as farm products is that without it, ranchers have no economic incentive to encourage wolves their land, or for that matter to actively promote habitat for any other wildlife that directly compete with their herds for ranch resources or restrict what can be done on the land. The situation instead gets reduced to yet another conflict between (federal) government regulation and private property, and between human needs and those of rare species. This is a losing proposition for both, not to mention highly insensitive to the issues confronting those who live on the land and depend on its resources to support their families. Again, it may require an entirely different approach to the problem to break this pattern.
What is the real market value of a wolf population sustained on public as well as private lands? "What the market will bear" is the classic response, but I believe even more so what is fair to the rancher, and determining what is fair cannot be done by bureaucrats or conservationists or anyone else in a vacuum. Nor can it be based soley on emotion: there should be some good transparent science and economic analysis too.
The market for wolf conservation as a ranch product might well need to include payments from conservationists like me and conservation organizations ponying up alongside federal and state subsidies and compensation schemes. If society, or some segments of it, values predators, it should be willing to pay market values to those who choose to accomodate wolves on their ranches and who incur greater economic risk thereby.
There are economists and conservations who promote just this path and I link to several of these at my personal blog: Conservation Finance and Biopolitical, to name just two. I believe Minnesota had a state sponsored compensation scheme in the late 1970s that paid a flat rate of $400 for every sheep killed by wolves.
Every situation is different, and I would not presume to offer this to you or anyone else as a silver bullet for ranching alongside wolves, particularly posed as it is by someone unknown and from the outside.
I have seen it work firsthand, however, in southern Africa where the problem faced by farmers - both commercial ranchers on private lands and communal area farmers on government lands - was conflict over resources with elephants. Elephants destroyed water infrastructure and fencing, food crops, sometimes killed livestock, and in rare but well known cases caused permanent injury or death to people. Farmers, especially subsistance farmers who derived no benefits from wildlife and bore all the costs, had no reason to support their conservation and as a result poaching was a real threat to elephant survival in many areas.
I was part of a conservation scheme in the late 1990s that was designed by the farmers themselves and provided for under law to compensate people in real terms for economic losses caused by elephants, as well as to diversify farm livelihoods. It was meant to lower the risk of economic hardship by paying the median market value for livestock in any given year that were killed by elephants, as well as the replacement value of damaged private infrastructure and compensation came from conservation non-profits, eco-tourism, and international wildlife entitites. The government created the enabling legal framework but the money came from the conservation interests. Local people and rights and responsibilities for wildlife management to meet environmental and ecological goals and participation was voluntary. And some elephants were sustainably culled by trophy hunters to pay for the remainder.
We may be a long way from the time in America when such a process would be feasible, let alone welcomed. The null hypothesis is that wolves will keep expanding their ranges until they are delisted from the federal endangered species list and the only recourse that ranchers will likely have even then is fewer restrictions on shooting wolves. This may not address the impacts of wolves on livestock - many animals, including wolves, increase their reproductive rates in response to hunting pressure - and wolves will still be an emotional issue for those who do not have to live with them as well as those who do.
The USFWS Safe Harbors program takes short steps in this direction by providing a mechanism for private land owners to voluntarily participate for a set period and maintain rare species habitat without further encumbering their ability to use their land under the endangered species act and with the option not to renew when the term of the program expires. Something like that, coupled with a real value for direct economic costs, a more participatory predator management program and a process of documentation and payment that is not unduly onerous might work for some species - even predators like wolves - in some situations. I have not done a full cost /benefit analysis, have no professional stake as I work as a conservationist in Connecticut, and am not qualified to say whether it would have any legs at all in Montana. That's why I'm asking you guys.
My thanks for your patience with this long reply.
Again, in Africa, there are compensation schemes that promote cheetah conservation on commercial farms as ranch products in Namibia. Stock raiding leopards are culled by trophy hunters and the proceeds go to those who live on the land and contract directly with the safari operators.
Wolves, Coyotes, Cougar, Grizzly, Bobcats and Eagles - in no particular order - seem to be among the main predators of livestock larger than poultry in the US. Wolves, Bald Eagles and Grizzly are species with federal protection and of particular conservation concern in the lower 48. All three are candidates for delisting in some portion of their current range.
There is some evidence on the web of research into the effectiveness of predator compensation schemes for wolves. Here is one such link http://www.kora.unibe.ch/pdf/cdpnews/cdpnews003.pdf that I have not fully yet digested but looks promising. Let me know what you think and thanks for taking the time on this with me. I know you've got other demands on your time besides blogging.
This doesn't take into account the weight loss my other cattle might have from being harassed by the wolves. So how can I economically make this work? I'm open to suggestions. I just don't see it.
As to whether your cattle would lose weight from fear when subject to predation, I believe neither you nor I have gotten to the bottom of that debate. How do they respond to coyotes, which I understand account for the greatest percerntage of stock losses to predators in the US? That might give an indication.
Here in France we have much the same problems. Several wolf packs have come across the border from Italy, and the shepherds are up in arms. They also readily demand compensation for all sorts of damage supposedly done by wolves. Since the person who decides if compensation should be paid is the vet who lives in the local community, and it is government money, there is very likely too much compensation being paid.
That doesn't mean that wolves don't kill sheep, they do. One solution has been the introduction of the Pyrenean Mountain Dog, also called the Patous, to this area, the Maritime Alps. The dogs grow up with sheep, become very protective, and scare any wolves off. It is a great dog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_Mountain_Dog
My feeling about compensation is that if conservationists want wolves, they should pay for them, enough so that ranchers would want to have them around. One way could be to estimate the wolf population in an area, and then pay per wolf per year. Then conservationists would have to decide how many wolves they needed.