DIXON — Raising cattle on the rangeland of western Montana has never been particularly easy. Scarcity of forage, drought and contending with predators are all part of the landscape.
Recently, though, a number of Dixon area ranchers have had the worst of it. Wolves have attacked and taken calves and grown cows. In one case, a rancher was face to face with a snarling wolf, vying for a carcass.
At this point, there is no debate as to whether or not cattle killed up Valley Creek is the work of wolves or some other predator.
“There have been numerous confirmed depredations,” said federal Wildlife Services agent Ted North.
North works for the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, investigating predator attacks. The agency is in charge of determining if a kill is, indeed, by a wolf.
“We look for things like signs of the animals that have been there,” he said, “like scat.” Other indicators include hair, tracks, the location of the bite on the affected animal and bite size.
“There’s a big difference between a wolf bite size and a coyote bite size,” North added.
The ranchers will tell you the same.
“They’re a killing machine,” Valley Creek rancher Wes Mapston said of the wolves.
Mapston told of how they found one cow. Foresters working in the area called the Mapstons about wolves harassing their cattle, and when the ranchers arrived, they found one cow with “meat just hanging down in strips on her back side.”
“She was still alive,” added Wes’ wife, Carol Sue.
“The whole back end was eat out of it. Strips of hide an inch wide were hanging down,” Wes continued. Carol Sue was visibly upset. “The suffering of the domestic animals is just terrible,” she said.
The Mapstons brought the animal home with them, but she died that night.
Wolves have always been a part of the Northern Rockies ecosystem, ranchers acknowledge. But the predators were eradicated in the last century, and cattle ranches and human settlement expanded into the range.
“There aren’t many places in northwest Montana that have the livestock density in the forest that we have here,” said Tribal Wildlife Biologist Stacy Korvel.
Tribal grazing allotments, he explained, were set up years ago, when wolves were not a concern.
“We were pretty effective at eliminating predators, so this is new, dealing with wolves.”
The dense forest cover on some of the allotments makes it difficult to detect predator activity, Korvel said. And its not that there isn’t any other food choice for the wolves, he said.
“I don’t think the prey base is a problem. Our overflights have shown we have healthy game populations in that area,” he said. But, “they’re surrounded by cows.”
Ranchers, however, disagree with Korvel’s assessment of prey levels. Few have seen any deer in their hayfields this year. They think the wolves have eaten them down, and now have turned to cattle.
Melanie McCollum lost a number of calves this year. The one that hurts the most is a 4-H calf she lost. “She was tame, like a pet,” McCollum said. And it hurts how the calf was killed, she said.
“That little calf … of ours, they flanked it. It had flesh hanging down in pieces about eight by ten inches.”
After another cow was killed, McCollum said she was informed by North to bring the carcass in. She went out to drag it in or tarp it, the recommended way of “securing” a kill until it can be confirmed by APHIS.
“When I got there the wolf was still there … he started following me around when I was pulling the carcass,” McCollum relayed. “He started gritting his teeth and growling.”
Armed only with a pitchfork, she did manage to claim the cow eventually. As the wolf ran off, he left behind chunks of meat that he had ripped from the carcass. They were about two pounds each, McCollum said.
One of the hardest things for the ranchers living with wolves in the Dixon area to cope with is their legal inability to defend their livestock.
Because wolves are members of a federally protected endangered species, ranchers may not legally harass or kill them, even in defense of their livestock. The line is a political one.
All wolves north of Interstate 90 are considered endangered, while packs south of I-90 are designated “non-essential, experimental populations,” according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Wolf Management Specialist Kent Laudon.
The boundary was set up by the federal government to allow for management of wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone Park in the mid-1990’s. The non-essential designation allows “more flexibility in managing” those wolves, he said, including lethal means if they conflict with cattle.
But the Valley Creek wolves, known as the He-wolf pack, are considered endangered.
The difference lies in when the wolves entered the area.
According to the Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks web site, wolves were eradicated from Montana in the 1930’s. In 1971, the animals were given federal protection through the Endangered Species Act.
Then, as part of a recovery effort, wolves were famously reintroduced to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming in 1995.
What many didn’t know is that there were already wolves in Montana.
The He-wolf pack “naturally repopulated on their own, and came down from Canada,” said Liz Bradley, also of FWP.
Yet there were no records of wolves south of I-90, so the highway became the obvious line to draw in delineating “experimental” from known packs.
As Kent Laudon explained, “You cannot designate as non-essential an existing population (of a federally endangered species).”
But he sympathizes with the ranchers. “You can protect human life,” he said.
That wasn’t so clear to Melanie McCollum.
“The guy from Fish and Wildlife told me I’d spend six months in jail if I killed one,” she said.
“These wolves are in the threatened and endangered zone,” reminded Korvel.
“These are still endangered animals.”
“If you were defending your life, if a wolf were charging you, I don’t know,” Korvel said.
But Laudon said the law is clear. “Anyone can kill a wolf in self-defense or defense of another person. That’d be ridiculous if the law said ‘Too bad, you’re just (predator) food now.’”
One reason Korvel thinks McCollum may have encountered the wolf is her dogs.
As with most ranchers, Melanie McCollum had her dogs with her the night she met the wolf.
Korvel said that the wolf was probably more interested in the dogs than in the rancher.
“Wolves see dogs as competitors,” Korvel said, “as an outside pack.”
“I would not bring my dogs into a wolf rendezvous site,” emphasized Laudon.
For some of the ranchers, there is no choice.
The dogs go with the ranchers, and the ranchers go to their cows.
“You got 125 cows and you don’t got no pasture at home, what are you gonna do? That’s your grazing allotment, that’s where you gotta put them,” said Charlie Hanson. His allotment is Valley Creek, a known rendezvous site for the pack.
Another ranch couple, Sally and Chuck Sanders, is in the thick of it as well. “Our range unit is He-wolf — right where they den,” said Sally.
Korvel sympathized. “Ranchers rely on that grass for summer range,” he said. But sympathy isn’t enough.
“If we had the right to defend ourselves, that would help,” said rancher Ross Middlemist. “We all feel a moral obligation to protect our animals.”
“It would help if they took them off the endangered species list,” added Max Johnson, another rancher who has lost cattle to wolves.
“When they let these wolves go, what did they think they were going to eat?” asked Alvaretta Morin, a rancher who has suffered losses.
“They said they’ll eat the sick and the weak elk, but I don’t think so. They’re going to eat those baby calves that are just lying there.”
Korvel agrees, but thinks it is simply efficiency on the wolves’ part.
“The wolves have been taking down elk, but it’s a lot easier to take down a 500 pound calf that can’t run, than a 500 pound elk that can.”
Ranchers in the Dixon area have tried to keep the wolves at bay. Through a college student’s thesis project, some of the ranchers have tried a type of fencing called “turbo fladry.”
Fladry is a low-lying fence, about a foot off the ground, electrified and strung with red flags every eleven inches. “We calved within that fence and we didn’t have a single loss while they were in there,” said Sally Sanders. But, she said, a day and a half later, after releasing the cow-calf pairs from the enclosure, the wolves attacked.
The fencing, both ranchers and Korvel point out, is expensive, difficult to maintain, and, as Korvel said,“wolves will eventually cross it.”
The Valley Creek ranchers who used the fence loved it, but the grad student came and took it away.
There are few other alternatives; fewer still are practical.
Morin gave one example.
“The people who want to save the wolves want us to hire a person to go out and ride every morning to look for wolves.” But a range rider is inefficient.
“They don’t realize it’s a 40,000 acre pasture,” Hanson said. It would take days to circumscribe the whole area, and, as Morin pointed out,
“You can go past an area and an hour later a wolf can come in and kill something.”
‘The people who want to save the wolf,’ as Morin refers to them, are the Defenders of Wildlife, a national environmental group that offers ranchers monetary compensation for confirmed wolf kills.
“They say they’ll pay us, but do they pay for our extra time, for our heartbreak? (The cows) go through hell dying,” said Sanders.
“It’s an economic impact on the whole community,” said Jerry Hamel. The ranchers, he said, spend their money locally. Livestock losses mean income loss, and income loss means less money spent locally, Hamel iterated.
Plus, the loss of one breeder cow represents the loss of future calves as well, added Jerry’s wife Beverly.
“If they kill a three year old cow, that’s ten years of calves you lose.”
Charlie Hanson mentioned another impact. His cattle aren’t gaining the weight they should. The cows are stressed, he said. “They’re losing weight,” he said, as they’re pushed through the range by the wolves’ presence.
Defenders’ Northern Rockies representative Suzanne Stone said the organization will help.
“We cover confirmed losses up to $3000 per animal based on fair market value,” she said.
The organization’s payments are supposed to offset ranchers’ losses, but that hasn’t been the case in the Dixon area.
Stone said Defenders will pay ranchers “somewhere between two and four weeks” after receiving a claim, but not one Valley Creek rancher who has lost a cow has been paid.
“My neighbor had a calf killed last fall,” Hamel stated, “and still hasn’t gotten anything.”
Hanson lost calves this spring, and though he sent in the requisite paper work to Defenders, “They sent it back,” he said, “twice.”
And there is a discrepancy in potential payment amounts as well.
“I was told … they’ll pay you $500. I don’t think that really cuts it,” Hanson said.
Stone said the group will not pay for “missing cattle,” including calves lost from cows that were put to pasture with them in the spring. The group requires certified evidence of losses, she said, but ranchers say the wolves typically don’t leave much behind.
“Overnight, it’s gone,” said Hanson.
“We’ve found just a backbone,” said Mapston.
And even Melanie McCollum, who has had APHIS-confirmed losses of llamas as well as cows and calves, said “we haven’t received anything” from the pro-wolf group.
In fact, of all the ranchers in the area, only one has gotten paid.
Ross Middlemist received a partial payment for buying hay to keep his cows close-in, and not putting them out to pasture. “Our hay bill was $14,000 more than it should have been,” he said. Defenders paid for half.
Even with all the losses, and the lack of promised payment, the ranchers don’t blame the wolves.
“There’s no two ways about it,” said Morin, “they gotta eat.”
But for the He-wolf pack, time is up.
“That pack is slated for removal,” said Korvel.
“He-wolf’s been chronic,” he said of the packs depredations.
The adults have taught the pups that cattle are an easy mark, and that behavior can’t be tolerated from a pack so close to livestock and human settlement.
“It’s to the point that they all need to go.”
The biologist removed four wolves from the He-wolf pack last week, and has five more to go.
“I don’t know how long it will take,” Korvel said. “We’ll just keep at it ‘til it’s done.”
Still, wolves in Montana are faring well. So much so, in fact, that they are slated for a delisting hearing sometime in 2008. That, Liz Bradley said, will help immensely.
“We do have a recovered population of wolves in Montana,” she said.
“After delisting, wolves will be treated the same as black bears and mountain lions,” Bradley said.
“You can shoot them in defense of private property.”
But for now, she added, “it’s a challenge when you have one population being considered endangered.”
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