Wolf pups slain after packs kill livestock
In fringe habitat areas with livestock, wolves will just cause trouble, coordinator says.
By Angus M. Thuermer Jr., Jackson Hole, Wyo.
June 30, 2010
Federal agents wiped out a wolf pack and part of a second, including 10 pups, in parts of Wyoming last week, drawing criticism from an environmental group.
The killing of the pups, along with adult wolves, took place near Kemmerer and Cody, federal wildlife officials said in a weekly report posted on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Web site. Members of the packs had killed livestock in areas where wolves have been a chronic problem in the past, federal wolf coordinator for Wyoming Mike Jimenez said Tuesday.
In all, 16 wolves were killed after they killed three calves on private property near Cody and a lamb near Dempsey Creek, northwest of Kemmerer.
Killing of the pups brought a protest from Suzanne Asha Stone of Defenders of Wildlife in Boise, Idaho.
“Simply killing wolves and their young, whether or not they’ve been implicated in conflicts, does very little to resolve the problem,” she said in a letter to the editor this week. “Instead, state wildlife agencies should work with ranchers to reduce the risks of depredations via effective nonlethal solutions.”
Loss of the wolves will mean nothing to the Wyoming population, Jimenez said. Such killings were contemplated when wolves were brought back to Yellowstone National Park from Canada in 1995.
Because the effort to restore the predator to the world’s first national park and surrounding areas has been so successful, they are now spreading out to colonize areas with marginal wildlife prey, he said. Data collected by biologists indicates that wolves in such areas are likely to continue to run into trouble for killing stock, he said.
“We all agreed to this in 1994,” he said of language in an environmental study that includes pups as potential victims should their parents kill stock. “It is the trust we made with the public” in exchange for bringing back the wolf.
“I don’t want to kill pups, nobody wants to,” Jimenez said. But, “We are not going to allow wolves to raise wolves that depredate. We’re going to make sure the livestock industry is not unduly impacted.”
Solutions proposed by conservation groups, such as using flagging and guard dogs to scare wolves, won’t work in some open-range situations, Jimenez said. Killing wolves is the only solution, he said.
“In areas where there’s chronic depredation, now we stop it very quickly,” he said.
That happens regardless of whether the responsible pack has gotten in trouble for only the first time, he said.
“It’s not necessarily this pack, but this area,” he said of the logic behind speedy killing.
The number of conflicts between wolves and stock in Wyoming, with the exception of the killing of sheep in the middle part of the state last year, has been going down recently, he said. There are now more than 200 wolves in the state outside Yellowstone, and the population grew 26 percent last year.
The population can stand the recent killings “without a blink,” he said.
This article was corrected on 6/30/10 from its original form to reflect the fact that only one entire wolf pack was eliminated. The original story said otherwise – Eds.
