01/20/05 Ease wolf management restrictions

Now some land owners in Idaho and neighboring Montana may question the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's recent relaxation of rules pertaining to wolf population management in the Rocky Mountain region. After all, the rule expands the authority of states and tribal governments with wolf management plans approved by Fish and Wildlife. Since Grey wolf populations were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park in 1995, and later expanded to Idaho and Montana, the species has made a significant recovery. So much so that neighboring states like Oregon are now in the process of drawing up wolf management plans in the event species cross over the border. But back to the concerns by landowners, concerns with wolf populations making a comeback that their domestic pets and livestock might be threatened. Ed Bangs is Fish and Wildlife's Wolf Recovery Manager for the Northwest, and he says contrary to the fear, livestock safety really isn't an issue. BANGS: Actually, the number of problems we've had with livestock have been below our predictions. We estimated that for every one hundred adult wolves we had running around out there, we'd lose between ten to twenty cattle, and fifty to seventy sheep per year. To put that in perspective, before we ever put wolves in Yellowstone, livestock producers told us they were losing 13,000 sheep and about 8,300 cattle each year to a whole hosts of causes, most of those have nothing to do with predators. Yet as Bangs astutely points out, while wolf predation is small if you go inside the numbers, the most important number to a farmer or rancher is one&as in the number of livestock killed before that person becomes emotionally fueled to do something about wolves. Bangs says that is one reason why the expanded regulations give property owners new tools to deal with predator wolves, including expanded rules allowing landowners the ability to kill wolves that attack livestock. That does not give people an out and out license to hunt Grey wolves as the species is still protected under the Endangered Species Act. But it is the ability to increase local decision making, among the many measures included in the expanded rules, that has drawn praises from lawmakers and many property owners in Idaho and Montana. And Bangs says if Wyoming is a correct model, what landowners in Idaho and Montana will find is that as wolf populations increase, they will have positive impacts on the soil, streams, fish and wildlife.