By ROCKY BARKER
Sheep rancher and state Sen. Jeff Siddoway gave up his fight for more tools to kill the wolves that have eaten his sheep and killed his guard dogs and done the same to ranchers across the state.
Fighting back tears, Siddoway acknowledged that his bill threatened to return wolves to the Endangered Species Act. He said he had spoken to U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, who authored legislation that removed wolves from the endangered species list, and asked the Senate to send the bill back to the Natural Resources and Environment Committee, where it will remain.
Siddoway did not say whether he will offer a different bill. His bill would have allowed anyone whose livestock or family pet was killed or harassed by wolves to shoot the wolves from airplanes, use night scopes on rifles or even lure the wolves with live bait.
The fourth-generation Idaho sheep man — Siddoway’s son is the fifth — said reintroduction of wolves in the 1990s has led to far more depredations by wolves than their supporters ever predicted.
Now, he said, nearly every ranching family who runs livestock in the mountains are regularly hit. Ranchers can do little to kill a wolf unless they catch it in the act of killing or harassing livestock.
“The killing is going on and on, almost on a daily basis,” said Siddoway a three-term legislator from Terreton in eastern Idaho.
Wolves also are killing 16,000 elk a year, he estimated, out of the state’s population of more than 100,000.
He has said his own losses in 2011 were more than 100 sheep and six guard dogs. And while all of the losses have not been verified officially, ranching families like his have records going back 100 years that show depredations have skyrocketed in the past five years as theIdaho wolf population has ballooned, he said.
Suzanne Asha Stone, Rocky Mountain Director of Defenders of Wildlife, said Idaho Fish and Game officials have a different story. She said that wolf depredations fell in the past year.
She attributes that reduction to the 400 wolves that hunters and wildlife officials killed in the past year. Fish and Game estimated Idaho had about 1,000 wolves a year ago.
“I don’t know if anybody knows how many are left,” she said.
Stone said her group has worked with sheep ranchers in Blaine County and had dramatic success reducing depredation using non-lethal tools like wolf-scaring devices. “His losses are preventable,” she said.
Siddoway said he and other ranchers can stay up all night and try to protect their sheep, but wolves can strike and then not return for weeks.
“That’s part of the frustration,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a pack of 15 or a pack of one or two.”
Simpson told Siddoway that his bill, if passed, could allow wolf-advocate groups to petition to have wolves returned to federal protection. Siddoway’s bill would have allowed killing of wolves beyond the 2002 Idaho wolf plan, the basis for removing wolves from the endangered species list.
Brian Kelly, the Idaho state supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told the Idaho Statesman that Siddoway’s bill would reverse a decade of work by the state and federal government to protect wolves and rancher interests under the Idaho wolf management plan.
The major problem is that the bill would have allowed people to kill any wolves within 36 hours of harassing livestock or family pets without approval of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. After 36 hours, a rancher would have had to get a state permit.
“What I’m telling people is anything that compromises or usurps the process or the management … is a problem for us,” Kelly said.
Siddoway said critics have dismissed the killing of livestock, pets and guard dogs in raising what he said were baseless fears over the treatment of animals that would be used as wolf bait. Those critics would leave ranchers with few tools to protect their own animals.
“You take your flashlight and your rifle and that’s all we’re going to allow you to use,” Siddoway said.