By PERRY BACKUS Ravalli Republic
HAMILTON — Some Bitterroot Valley livestock producers are gathering signatures on a petition to allow the county to institute a bounty that they think would create a wide-open season on wolves and mountain lions in Ravalli County.
The petition is based on a state law written in about 1930.
A grassroots organization called the Livestock Protection Group drew up the petition after discovering that state law still included a provision for predator bounties.
The bounty would pay $100 for a wolf or mountain lion and $20 for a wolf pup or mountain lion kitten. Coyotes will bring $5 for an adult and $2.50 for a pup.
The funds for the bounty would come from a fee imposed by the Ravalli County Commission on livestock.
Organizers fully expect that there will be a legal challenge to the notion that, if the county institutes a bounty under that decades-old state law, then people will be able to shoot predators any time of the year and get paid for it.
Under current state law, mountain lion and wolf hunting is managed by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
“This is totally different than sport hunting,” said Scott Boulanger, a Darby outfitter and member of the loose-knit Livestock Protection Group. “It would create a wide-open season for predators. The bounty system was created before there was a big-game season.”
“It will be interesting to see who trumps who,” he said. “We’re not lawyers. We just found this statute, and we intend to follow it through.”
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim said that department’s attorney interprets the bounty law differently.
“Our attorney’s interpretation is the county can, in fact, pay a bounty, but only on legally taken wolves,” Aasheim said. “Those wolves have to be taken with a license issued by the state of Montana.”
Boulanger said that, if 51 percent of the owners of livestock in the county sign the petition, the county is required to impose the fee that will be used to pay the bounties.
Boulanger said it’s not clear just how many head of livestock are in Ravalli County.
“Somehow, somewhere, somebody is going to have to determine what that number is,” he said.
State law gives the petitioners until August to get the required number of signatures.
Fourth-generation Bitterroot rancher Dalton Christopherson doesn’t think that’s going to be a problem.
“I don’t think it will take a whole lot of effort to get the amount of signatures we need,” Christopherson said. “We have to do something. They are destroying out livelihood.”
Christopherson said his family has lost quite a few cattle since wolves returned to the Bitterroot. So far, the ranchers have only been paid for three that were confirmed killed by wolves.
“You can only confirm that they are wolf kills if they leave something behind,” he said. “We run our cattle in big pastures, and that evidence is pretty dang hard to find. Sometimes we don’t know that we’ve lost something until we start bringing the cattle out of the hills and we have cows without calves and calves without cows.”
The family has run cattle on the same national forest grazing allotment since 1958.
Christopherson is discouraged that livestock producers will have to foot the bill for the bounty.
“There should be a tax on the Defenders of Wildlife or the federal Fish and Game,” he said. “They are the ones who put them here.”
Marc Cooke of the National WolfWatcher Coalition called the idea for a bounty “crazy.”
Under the proposal, all people who own livestock will have to pay a fee. It doesn’t matter if they agree with the bounty or not, he said.
“People just need to let this wolf hysteria calm down,” Cooke said. “Fish, Wildlife and Parks, to date, has voted every time to extend the hunt or escalate the number of wolves that are allowed to be killed.”
“People need to calm down and let FWP do their job,” he said. “They are the experts.”
Cooke said an FWP commissioner said at last month’s meeting that his friends who seriously hunted wolves or elk were successful.
“If people’s hatred for wolves is that great, they just need to get out of their pickup trucks and go look for them,” Cooke said. “They will have to really hunt for a change.”
***
Boulanger said the wildlife commission’s decision this month to not extend the wolf-hunting season in the West Fork of the Bitterroot has created additional interest in the bounty proposal.
“Once the FWP Commission threw the Bitterroot under the bus, that propelled this big time,” he said.
“Everyone was waiting to see if the system was going to work. When the commission said the quota of 18 was just the maximum number of wolves that could be killed, that really broke the heart of everyone who had faith in the system.”
Hunters harvested six wolves out of a quota of 18 in the West Fork of the Bitterroot during the state’s second wolf season.
The FWP Commission considered extending the wolf season into March, but opted against that move. Commissioners pointed to an ongoing elk/predator study taking place in that region as one reason that it chose not to extend the season.
“The commission is so far disconnected from the Bitterroot,” Boulanger said. “It seems like they are saying they will sacrifice the Bitterroot for the greater good. Let the Bitterroot ride for three more years and use the data gathered there to manage elk and wolves elsewhere.”
The group’s petition was reviewed by the Ravalli County Attorney’s Office.
“I believe it complies with the particular law that pertains to establishing a county bounty,” said Deputy County Attorney Howard Recht.
Recht predicted that won’t be the end of the legal review.
“The overall process for having a bounty for certain predators intersects with a lot of different laws,” Recht said. “There are state and federal laws that pertain to the subject. I presume they will have to be obeyed, too.”