The Associated Press
BOISE, IDAHO — Idaho wildlife managers have yet to receive federal funding to compensate ranchers for 2012 livestock losses from wolves, as other Western states are also competing for a share of just $850,000 meant to offset sheep and cattle losses from the predators.
The Times-News ( http://tinyurl.com/neebwjv) reports Dustin Miller, who heads Idaho’s Office of Species Conservation, said the money will eventually be divided between paying ranchers for losses and funding efforts to avoid wolf-livestock conflicts.
In 2011, the program paid Idaho ranchers about $100,000 for livestock losses.
“Unfortunately, we usually have the highest level of depredations in the country, and if it’s competitive, we may receive more funding than other states. But we can’t be sure,” Miller said. “We have no idea what we are going to receive, and I can’t guarantee producers who lost livestock . will be compensated at market rates.”
Federal officials say wolves killed 75 cattle and 330 sheep last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services agency that’s tasked with assisting livestock producers in Idaho and the United States in protecting their herds from predators.
Hunters’ success rates for the canine predators also improved significantly last year: Hunters and trappers killed 320 wolves in the 2012-2013 season, up from 200 in 2011, to trim wolf numbers statewide to roughly 638.
Last year, federal government wildlife agents also killed 69 wolves after determining they were targeting livestock.
Todd Grimm, the director of Wildlife Services in Idaho, says it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions from the number of cattle, sheep or wolves killed in a given year, as the number varies depending on numerous circumstances.
For instance, wolves killed 103 cattle and 411 sheep and lambs in 2009, a year he remembers as particularly hard on producers’ herds.
“Sometimes things happen,” Grimm said, on fluctuating predation numbers. “We just don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see what this year’s numbers point out.”
Livestock fall victim to other predators, too, he pointed out. In 2012, 23 cows and calves were killed by members of Idaho’s roughly 50,000-strong population of coyotes. Coyotes also killed 141 sheep and lambs last year, according to Wildlife Services records.
Grimm’s officers killed 3,048 coyotes in Idaho in control actions in 2012, according to the agency’s statistics.
Ranchers say they’ve come to acknowledge, if begrudgingly, the presence of wolves on Idaho’s landscape, following Congress’ lifting of federal Endangered Species Act protections for the state’s population in 2011. But they want to see active measures to control problem predators.
“We’re going to get by,” said sheep rancher John Faulkner, of Faulkner Land and Livestock in Gooding in south-central Idaho. “But we are going to kill some of them. That’s all there is to it.”
Environmentalists who have opposed federal delisting on grounds they don’t trust Idaho to manage its wolf population responsibly say simply killing the predators in a bid to keep them from attacking livestock isn’t appropriate.
Suzanne Stone, Northern Rockies representative for the Defenders of Wildlife, said ranchers should focus on deterrents including guard dogs, human herders, lighting, electric fencing and corrals bedecked with flags that flap in the wind, rather than rely on hunting or Wildlife Services’ lethal controls that she contends disrupts wolf packs.
That leaves juvenile wolves to wander without a social structure that would otherwise teach them to hunt elk or deer, Stone said.
“You’ve then got basically a bunch of teenagers running around, and they are the ones who tend to get in trouble more with people because they are not very savvy at hunting,” she said.