Sep. 3—Wildlife advocates hope new rules will stop the endangered Mexican wolves from being blamed for killing livestock they didn’t eat, which advocates believe has happened in recent years.
Cattle growers, meanwhile, said the new standards are a “poke in the eye” that will make it harder for them to receive compensation when one of their animals is wolfed down.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services recently released its new “standards of evidence” for determining livestock depredations by the Mexican gray wolves, known as lobos, that roam Arizona and southern New Mexico as part of a recovery program to restore the apex predator to the landscape.
The standards are important because wildlife officials can decide to kill or remove a wolf from the wild if it is found to be killing livestock, said Greta Anderson, the deputy director of the Western Watershed Project. In April, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it had killed a leader of a pack of wolves, which advocates had named Rusty, after it was determined that the wolf had killed at least nine livestock animals in a 10-month period.
But Loren Patterson, president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, said ranchers only receive compensation when one of their animals is confirmed to have been killed by a wolf. He said some of the new standards will make it harder to confirm a wolf was the culprit.
The new standards state that a confirmed wolf kill will require a subcutaneous hemorrhage, which means there was heavy or uncontrolled bleeding that shows the animal was still alive when the wolf attacked. The bite marks can also be measured to determine if it was caused by a wolf.
When a pack of wolves attacks a young calf, Patterson said, the death is almost instantaneous and gruesome.
“There isn’t even enough calf left to look at,” Patterson said. “So that is a problem.”
Additionally, when a cow is confirmed to have been killed by a wolf, Patterson said the rancher isn’t fully reimbursed. He said some of his producers are reporting that as much as 30% of their newborn calves succumb to wolves.
Advocates said that the removal or killings of critically endangered wolves should be reduced.
“It creates an instability within the whole wolf family to go through the removal of one of their members because they work as a group,” Anderson said. “Removals have an effect the genetic stability of the wild population, the integrity of these wolf families, and are generally not in line with recovering a species.”
Anderson said she and wolf experts reviewed years of investigative reports into suspected wolf kills. She said she and others suspect wolves have been blamed for killing animals that died in other ways.
Fish and Wildlife’s most recent quarterly report on the Mexican Wolf Recovery Program found that in the first six months of 2023, Mexican wolves killed 63 livestock animals in New Mexico and 16 in Arizona.
But Anderson said she suspects some of those animals were not killed by wolves. Patterson, on the other hand, said the report is likely undercounting wolf deaths.
Aislinn Maestas, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said officials use a variety of deterrents to prevent wolf-livestock encounters. Those include:
Electric fences around livestock;
Hay for livestock producers to keep livestock consolidated during calving season;
Contract employees who monitor wolf movements in relation to cattle;
Moving livestock between pastures to avoid areas of high-wolf use, including den and rendezvous sites;
Fences around private property to protect vulnerable animals;
Monitoring equipment issued to livestock producers to facilitate their own proactive management activities and aid in the detection and prevention of livestock depredations;
Providing wolves with carcasses or carnivore logs to reduce potential conflicts with livestock;
Officials with the USDA couldn’t be reached for comment during the week.
Maestas said that once a wolf is determined to have killed a domestic animal, multiple factors are considered before deciding to kill or remove that wolf from the wild. They include the likelihood the wolf will continue preying on domestic animals, the toll the killings have on livestock producers and the impact the removal will have on the recovery program.
There are not many of the wolves left. There are about 350 in captivity and about 240 in the wild. Males weigh 60 to 70 pounds and females weigh 50 to 60 pounds. The wolf was listed as endangered in 1976, and in 1998 the first captive wolf was released into the wild in New Mexico and Arizona.
“Our hope is that there’s a more accurate reporting on wolf involvement and livestock deaths,” Anderson said of the evidence standards. “So the public is getting a more accurate picture of what’s actually happening on the ground.”
Source: Yahoo News
