You Can't kill the weather, but you can kill predators
If a wolf or mountain lion shows up on their properties, why do farmers and ranchers often prefer to grab a gun and kill it instantly? Despite the fact that disease and the weather kill FAR more livestock than wolves, a rancher cannot control the weather. He cannot stop a flood, cannot discharge the lightning. What he can do, however, is kill a wolf. In doing so, he gets immediate satisfaction, an immediate show for his efforts in protecting his cattle or sheep. But what he doesn't know is that he is likely making things worse.
How Much livestock do wolves kill?
Nearly every anti-wolf person makes the claim that wolves are decimating livestock, robbing hardworking ranchers of their livelihoods, taking away their inventory. Just like the myth that wolves are decimating the deer and elk, wolves do not ravish livestock. In fact, they take very few considering their role as apex predators. Take a look at these images below, conducted using USDA livestock reports from 2015; it should be noted that these numbers are based on unconfirmed reports of predation. This means that the cause of death for the livestock is not confirmed by USDA or USFW personnel, so likely even these numbers are inflated. Of course, it should be noted that there are certainly wolf kills that never get found or reported as well.
Let's dive a little bit deeper into these reports, including why killing wolves often does nothing, or increases livestock losses.
Disease attracts predators
As you probably know, wolves and other carnivores most often/ prefer to take prey that is weak. This is so that they limit their own chances of injury, and also limit expenditure of energy. In the west, cattle and sheep are often turned out onto BLM or Forest Service land (so yes, you pay for it with your federal taxes) with little or no supervision. Some folks check their livestock every day, or hire range riders to keep an eye on their herds. Many don't. Not only does this lack of supervision increase the chances of a wolf attack, but it also means nobody may notice a sick cow or ewe. Well, nobody except a predator. Livestock, which are slow and not wolf-savvy, are already easy enough to kill. But a diseased animal is far more likely to get attacked by a wolf pack. As you can see from those numbers above, disease is a HUGE livestock killer, far more than wolves. The less ranchers take care of their animals, the more tempting their animals are for an easy meal.
What a lot of people don't talk about is the fact that the livestock wolves- or other carnivores- do take aren't usually checked for pre-kill condition. So if a cow is already sick, or has a broken leg, or is filled with parasites before it is selected as a wolf target, it's often not reported.
You don't have to know much about either ranching or wolves to conclude that farmers need to improve the living conditions of their stock if they want to limit their losses.
Oh, and as the photo below demonstrates, sick livestock are usually put down anyway. Click it to watch a video.
What a lot of people don't talk about is the fact that the livestock wolves- or other carnivores- do take aren't usually checked for pre-kill condition. So if a cow is already sick, or has a broken leg, or is filled with parasites before it is selected as a wolf target, it's often not reported.
You don't have to know much about either ranching or wolves to conclude that farmers need to improve the living conditions of their stock if they want to limit their losses.
Oh, and as the photo below demonstrates, sick livestock are usually put down anyway. Click it to watch a video.
Coyote Control
Just by looking at those statistics, we see that coyotes are responsible for many times more livestock losses than wolves. Part of this is, of course, there are many more coyotes than wolves. But it has more to do with the fact that coyotes are much less fearful of humans than wolves. Nonetheless, did you know that wolf populations actually control coyotes? Wolves are competitive with other wolves (intraspecific competition) and other species like coyotes (interspecific competition). They do not tolerate coyotes, and will kill them if they get the chance. This may seem like type-A behavior of a bully, but it's yet another example of how human perspectives of cruelty shouldn't be applied to wildlife. By killing coyotes, wolves increase their chance of prey access and survival.
This is actually good news for ranchers. Having a wolf pack around means that his/her coyote population is likely going to drop, and thus will the more-likely chances of livestock predation by a coyote. Wolves have been shown to decrease coyote populations by about 20-30%; in Yellowstone, upon wolf reintroduction in 1995, coyotes went from being the park's top dog to decreasing by 50%.
This is actually good news for ranchers. Having a wolf pack around means that his/her coyote population is likely going to drop, and thus will the more-likely chances of livestock predation by a coyote. Wolves have been shown to decrease coyote populations by about 20-30%; in Yellowstone, upon wolf reintroduction in 1995, coyotes went from being the park's top dog to decreasing by 50%.
Social Disturbance: Why shooting wolves doesn't help
I've stated many times both online and in my research that killing wolves to save livestock does not solve the problem. This sounds ridiculous, right? How can getting rid of wolves possibly help protect livestock against wolf attacks? The answer lies in an essential understanding of wolf behavior. Social disturbance is a concept in carnivore biology that relates to how social predators like wolves, lions, and hyenas react to lethal control of their species. Wolves rely on each other to hunt, to coordinate, to look out for enemies, to raise puppies, and to just generally survive.
In a wolf pack, only the lead male and female are allowed to breed. They're known as the breeding male and the breeding female. They're often the wolves targeted first in lethal control, as Washington state has demonstrated. The logic behind this is that removing the breeders will remove the prospects of more puppies and thus an increase in wolf populations and an increase in livestock predations. There are several problems with this logic.
In a wolf pack, only the lead male and female are allowed to breed. They're known as the breeding male and the breeding female. They're often the wolves targeted first in lethal control, as Washington state has demonstrated. The logic behind this is that removing the breeders will remove the prospects of more puppies and thus an increase in wolf populations and an increase in livestock predations. There are several problems with this logic.
- Wolves mate for life- until one dies. Removing a breeding member of the pack may temporarily halt breeding but it won't be a permanent change. The urge to reproduce is why wolves disperse from their natal packs, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles to find a place in another pack (a visualization on social disturbance is down below).
- Wolf populations do not correlate with livestock predations. Look at this graph below. With the exception of Minnesota, when you increase the wolf population (x-axis; moving to the right), you do not increase the livestock predations (y-axis; moving up). This means something else- or likely a combination of variables- is responsible for livestock losses by wolves. Even if removing breeding pairs helps decrease the wolf population (it doesn't), this isn't correlated with livestock predations in the first place.
- Removing one or two members of the breeding pair doesn't just take the breeders; it takes what are most likely the two most experienced wolves in the pack. They are also the most experienced hunters, the ones the most likely to lead the pack to successfully kill wild prey like elk or deer. Without one or more of their leaders, the remaining wolf pack - usually yearlings or other young wolves with a lot less experience- now have to turn to easier prey. Sometimes, this means beavers or squirrels. But also sometimes, this means livestock.
How about if you remove the entire pack? This way, not only the breeders are gone, but so are the inexperienced yearlings. Well... that's not going to help you either. Wolves are highly territorial, forming jigsaw-like boundaries between claimed wilderness. They spend much of their time patrolling their borders, marking with their scent, and looking out for intruders. Those intruders are often killed. In fact, in natural settings without human disturbance, the biggest killer of wolves is other wolves. Not only does this demonstrate that wolves do actually control their own populations - otherwise, too many wolves will starve - but it explains why removing packs to protect livestock doesn't help. When you remove an entire pack, you have just opened up an entire free territory for dispersing wolves to move right in. Dispersing wolves are most often young, sexually mature wolves that have left their natal pack in order to find a territory and mate so they can breed; this means that, once again, that empty territory will be home to more inexperienced hunters. It might take a week, a year, or two years, but eventually you're going to have another wolf pack right in that area; and that wolf pack might turn to the exact same pattern of killing livestock.
Once again, the state of Washington so elegantly illustrated this prospect. In 2016, Washington killed the entire Prosperity Peak pack because it had preyed on livestock in Colville National Forest, where ranchers could bring their livestock with a permit from Forest Service. At the time this was 10% of the Washington wolf population. The rancher responsible for these killings is Diamond M Ranch (to date, they are responsible for about 80% of Washington wolf deaths). Diamond M refuses to take part in the Cooperative Damage Agreement, which compensates ranchers for market-value livestock losses by wolves. Diamond M refuses to take these compensations because they feel it means that they are formally acknowledging that wolves are here to stay. According to lawsuit papers, Diamond M set salt licks beside roads and within 200 yards of a Prosperity Peak den site, which does go against permit requirements for the Forest Service. Regardless, in 2016, Washington Fish and Wildlife allowed for all 7 members of the Prosperity Peak pack to be killed from helicopters and by state hunters. By the way, the killings cost $130,000 in Washington taxes. Had Diamond M taken the compensation instead, it would have cost tax payers only about $75,000 instead.
But then, just recently in 2019, Washington killed yet another wolf pack; this one called Old Profanity Territory (OPT) pack because guess what? This pack occupied essentially the same territory as the displaced Prosperity Peak pack from a couple years before (you can see the maps below for the comparison). After Washington killed the first couple wolves, reports came through about Diamond M possibly baiting wolves by bringing livestock close to dens or rendezvous sites, as well as range riders being fired and therefore the required nonlethal methods not being implemented before lethal control was to be used. A judge ruled that the wolf killings must stop until further investigation, but it was too late... that morning, before the 8am court case, WDFW hunters had gone out and killed the remaining pack members. This included multiple 4 month old puppies. As of November 2019, the Togo wolf pack (bordering OPT) also has a death warrant against it; and days after Governor Inslee issued a statement that wolf killings need to decrease in the state, WDFW announced that the breeding female of the Grouse Flats pack had been killed.
Despite the shady or not-shady aspects of the recent Washington wolf control, the story of the Prosperity Peak and OPT packs very clearly demonstrates that killing a pack will just open another territory for another to take its place.
Once again, the state of Washington so elegantly illustrated this prospect. In 2016, Washington killed the entire Prosperity Peak pack because it had preyed on livestock in Colville National Forest, where ranchers could bring their livestock with a permit from Forest Service. At the time this was 10% of the Washington wolf population. The rancher responsible for these killings is Diamond M Ranch (to date, they are responsible for about 80% of Washington wolf deaths). Diamond M refuses to take part in the Cooperative Damage Agreement, which compensates ranchers for market-value livestock losses by wolves. Diamond M refuses to take these compensations because they feel it means that they are formally acknowledging that wolves are here to stay. According to lawsuit papers, Diamond M set salt licks beside roads and within 200 yards of a Prosperity Peak den site, which does go against permit requirements for the Forest Service. Regardless, in 2016, Washington Fish and Wildlife allowed for all 7 members of the Prosperity Peak pack to be killed from helicopters and by state hunters. By the way, the killings cost $130,000 in Washington taxes. Had Diamond M taken the compensation instead, it would have cost tax payers only about $75,000 instead.
But then, just recently in 2019, Washington killed yet another wolf pack; this one called Old Profanity Territory (OPT) pack because guess what? This pack occupied essentially the same territory as the displaced Prosperity Peak pack from a couple years before (you can see the maps below for the comparison). After Washington killed the first couple wolves, reports came through about Diamond M possibly baiting wolves by bringing livestock close to dens or rendezvous sites, as well as range riders being fired and therefore the required nonlethal methods not being implemented before lethal control was to be used. A judge ruled that the wolf killings must stop until further investigation, but it was too late... that morning, before the 8am court case, WDFW hunters had gone out and killed the remaining pack members. This included multiple 4 month old puppies. As of November 2019, the Togo wolf pack (bordering OPT) also has a death warrant against it; and days after Governor Inslee issued a statement that wolf killings need to decrease in the state, WDFW announced that the breeding female of the Grouse Flats pack had been killed.
Despite the shady or not-shady aspects of the recent Washington wolf control, the story of the Prosperity Peak and OPT packs very clearly demonstrates that killing a pack will just open another territory for another to take its place.
Social Disturbance In a Nutshell
I created the following graphic to help visualize the two concepts of social disturbance and how it often backfires when it comes to preventing wolf predation on livestock.
The Science
This theory is all well and good, but where's the science that backs it up? Click the links below to read studies done about lethal control on not just wolves, but other social carnivores. If you want to see preliminary work on my own research on this topic, click here. Skeptical about using statistical models to predict livestock and wolf conflict? Don't be.
- This study based in Idaho split an area into a "protected" (wolves could not be shot; nonlethal methods were taught and implemented to ranchers and sheep flocks in this area) and "non protected" (wolves could be shot) areas. The results showed that in the non-protected area (the one where wolves were shot), there were three and a half times more sheep losses than in the protected area.
- Coyotes are the main focus on this study, which highlights the failures of government predator control programs and how market values of animals, used to determine how much loss is attributed to predators, are swayed across the changing economic market against the predators.
- This study looked at comparable lethal and nonlethal efforts against wolves, cougars, bears, lynx, etc. in both the US and Europe; the conclusions demonstrated that nonlethal methods were better preventers of wolf predations on livestock.
- Risk maps were created in this study in order to demonstrate that prediction of wolf territory and behavior is an excellent form of protection and adaptability.
- This study from the Laikipia District in Kenya analyzed which methods were most successful in preventing cattle and goat predations by lions, leopards, cheetahs, and hyenas both in bomas (constructed, often circular livestock enclosure) and out in the fields. The most successful methods were livestock guardian dogs and an increased human presence... not lethal control (see bar graphs below).
- This meta-analysis looks at global implications for carnivore-human conflict, especially at the increase of human development and presence.
- Cougar sport hunting was shown to increase livestock predation complaints the following year by 36-40%.
Aren't nonlethal Methods expensive?
No. Are they more expensive than lethal? Depends. In the short term, yes, lethal methods are cheaper. But in the long term, nonlethal methods are more likely to save more livestock. In that same 2017 study on Idaho sheep, the researchers concluded that "insuring" one sheep against wolves using nonlethal protection cost only $3. Another idea? Perhaps ranchers need to be investing more resources or time to preventing/treating diseases in their animals, and making sure they're checked on to not only remove a sick animal but to lower the chance of a wolf or other predator seeing the chance for an easy meal.
"My friend didn't want to report all his cattle losses because it was a hassle."
When engaging with ranchers on the topic of wolves, I like to ask about a lot of the circumstances, such as kind of animal preyed upon, evidence of wolf attacks, nonlethal or lethal methods used etc. When I bring out my usual statistic about "wolves only taking 1% or so of livestock in the Rocky Mountain states", I often get replies like this: "Those stats aren't real; my friend didn't report all his calf losses because it was a pain to go through the process and get the money back". I feel for livestock raisers and their dependence on their animals, but when I get statements like these, I don't have much sympathy. My studies and experiences in Tanzania are the primary reasons.
Summer 2019, I had the chance to study and research carnivore-human conflict in Tanzania. I took part in a survey with a Maasai village about 1.5 hours outside of Serengeti National Park. First of all, most people don't know that the Maasai were forced out of the Serengeti by the government in order to make room for the park. Second of all, the Maasai do not receive compensation for livestock losses due to any wild carnivore. I talked with a couple who had lost all but two of their goats to hyenas. All but two. This was during the dry season, in rural Tanzania, where getting water means a 2 mile walk, there's little to no access to medical care, and often the livestock enclosures are simple bomas made of acacia thorns. Despite this loss, the couple asked me for nonlethal solutions to the hyenas (and other carnivores). I told them to try getting a dog, or hang a piece of human clothing from a stick to tell carnivores that there were humans nearby. They told me that despite all this, hyenas were their favorite carnivore. Why? They're smart and fun to watch. Our group, along with the Tarangire You can read more about my experiences with the Maasai and Tanzanian carnivore-human conflict here.
So you didn't report all your livestock losses because it was a pain to get money back? Too bad.
Summer 2019, I had the chance to study and research carnivore-human conflict in Tanzania. I took part in a survey with a Maasai village about 1.5 hours outside of Serengeti National Park. First of all, most people don't know that the Maasai were forced out of the Serengeti by the government in order to make room for the park. Second of all, the Maasai do not receive compensation for livestock losses due to any wild carnivore. I talked with a couple who had lost all but two of their goats to hyenas. All but two. This was during the dry season, in rural Tanzania, where getting water means a 2 mile walk, there's little to no access to medical care, and often the livestock enclosures are simple bomas made of acacia thorns. Despite this loss, the couple asked me for nonlethal solutions to the hyenas (and other carnivores). I told them to try getting a dog, or hang a piece of human clothing from a stick to tell carnivores that there were humans nearby. They told me that despite all this, hyenas were their favorite carnivore. Why? They're smart and fun to watch. Our group, along with the Tarangire You can read more about my experiences with the Maasai and Tanzanian carnivore-human conflict here.
So you didn't report all your livestock losses because it was a pain to get money back? Too bad.
Be a Part of the conversation
For as long as humans have domesticated animals, we have been at odds with carnivores. Humans saw carnivores as threats to their livelihood, and let's be real, animals don't exactly see us as saviors. Like I said, I truly do understand the need for ranchers to protect their livestock, to make a living and to ensure their own survival. But nonnegotiable evidence points the blame away from wolves and toward more preventative causes like disease/living conditions. Ranchers are crying wolf when really, the "big bad wolf" isn't the animal they think it is.
If you'd like to engage in thoughtful, respectful conversation about the ranch-wolf issue, or carnivore issues in general, feel free to email me at [email protected] , or send me a direct message on Facebook or Instagram. Pro-wolf people often forget to sympathize with people that rely on cattle or sheep, and anti-wolf people often forget upon whose land they are sending their thousands of head of stock.
If you'd like to engage in thoughtful, respectful conversation about the ranch-wolf issue, or carnivore issues in general, feel free to email me at [email protected] , or send me a direct message on Facebook or Instagram. Pro-wolf people often forget to sympathize with people that rely on cattle or sheep, and anti-wolf people often forget upon whose land they are sending their thousands of head of stock.
Header image: Trent Sizemore (@trentsizemore on Instagram)