Getting Ranchers to Tolerate Wolves–Before It’s Too Late

(Photo: Ken Canning / Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

Ever since the 1995 reintroduction of the gray wolf to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, ranchers in the region have loudly complained that their herds end up paying a heavy cost. Lately, as a result, they’ve taken to trapping and shooting wolves at every opportunity.

Hunters have already exterminated more than a third of the 1,600 wolves that were thought to live in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho in 2012, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ended endangered species protection for gray wolves there. Environmentalists now worry about the danger of a new regional extinction. Ranchers and some state wildlife officials meanwhile seem to be ardently working to achieve it.

The wolves are no longer safe even within a protected federal wilderness: Just last week, facing a lawsuit by environmental groups, the State of Idaho recalled a hunter it had sent into the Frank Church-River of No Return National Wilderness Area to kill wolves there. Environmentalists claimed a small victory. But state officials said the hunter had already killed nine wolves and presumably eliminated the two wolf packs thought to inhabit the wilderness.

In this combative context, a new study in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics reports the disturbing conclusion that the ranchers are right about at least one thing: The cost.

Together with his co-authors, Joseph P. Ramler, a graduate student in economics at the University of Montana, examined detailed livestock records over 15 years for 18 ranches in western Montana. Ranchers there typically graze cattle for part of the season on their own pastures, and then, for much of the summer, turn them out onto federal forests and grasslands. Ten of the ranches had lost calves to wolf attacks, and eight hadn’t.

Calculating the loss from an attack is relatively easy, and states have programs to compensate ranchers for the direct loss. But ranchers also complain, according to Ramler and his co-authors, that “wolves decrease the average weight of calves by stressing mother cattle, increasing movement rates, or encouraging inefficient foraging behavior.” That is, the cattle have to spend a lot more time looking around for danger, and a lot less with their heads down in the grass. The study set out to determine if ranchers are simply crying wolf, “or is there evidence that wolves have indirect effects on calf weight?”

First the good news: When the study mapped both the location of cattle and the movement of wolf packs, it found that simply having wolves in the vicinity