As a Colorado native, I embrace the return of wolves to Colorado. Unfortunately, state wildlife agencies are preoccupied with the reintroduction of the species and failed to account for the natural return of these predators. It is a situation that can be defused with some leadership and cooperation among stakeholders.

I grew up in Southwest Colorado on a couple of small ranches. I worked for the National Cattlemen’s Association in Denver. Colorado and other states have made great sacrifices for livestock producers over the past century. Agriculture now generates $47 billion annually and employs more than 195,000 people across the state. I see several sides to the issue. With more than 2.6 million head of cattle and $4 billion in annual revenue, beef is Colorado’s top agricultural product. The industry can afford to give a little back to the land and the people of Colorado, but it shouldn’t come on the back of a few small livestock producers.

State and federal agencies set this mess in motion by exterminating our wolves to support an emerging livestock industry almost 100 years ago. State and federal agencies are still spending millions of dollars to kill America’s predators for livestock producers. This money should be spent to compensate ranchers for losses instead of paying USDA’s Wildlife Services and other agencies to eliminate possible threats.

In the age of global warming, climate change, wildfires and drought, we must be smarter with our natural resources. Wildlife demands compassion, not more conflict.

Predators and their food sources have been disrupted in many ways thanks to wildfires and drought, which are causing severe stress and extreme behavior. In the wake of record heat, drought and wildfires, this winter will likely take a severe toll on wildlife populations across the West. Many predators will be pushed into new areas to survive, including more cities and towns. Predator migration isn’t just a rural issue. Colorado needs a plan to address wildlife migration now, especially as it relates to predators. Killing all that encroach on private property isn’t the answer.

Land use is now one of the most vital issues of our time. Livestock production is no exception:

• It requires mass quantities of scarce resources, including water and grain that could otherwise feed people.
• Livestock production generates tons of methane—a potent greenhouse gas.
• Agricultural expansion is pushing endangered species around the world into extinction. Consumers are as guilty as the producers.
• Thousands of cattle are turned loose on out mountains for below-market grazing. This subsidy is anti-competitive since it only benefits a few privileged cattle producers. Many of these cattle are abandoned on our public lands where they trash the watershed throughout the year.

Agriculture as a whole must be more responsible and accountable to meet the demands of a changing world. For example, it might make sense to turn some of these ranches in wolf country into carbon farms to eliminate conflicts with recovering wildlife populations. Hunting guides should at least add wolf-watching tours to their list of offerings. I know hundreds of people that are eager for an opportunity to see the first wolves back in Colorado.

Meanwhile, predator conservation across the American West remains a political piñata. A federal court restored protections for wolves across most of the United States last week, except for the northern Rockies. In Montana, on the border of Yellowstone National Park, hunters and trappers have eliminated an entire wolf pack. About one of every five Yellowstone wolves alive at the end of last summer is now dead. This area demands immediate protection. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland wrote the following public statement, which appeared in USA Today last week.

Wolves Demand More Protection

By Deb Haaland, U.S. Department Of The Interior Secretary

Since time immemorial, wolves have lived alongside Indigenous peoples and have represented the virtues of healing, strength and familial protection. In many tribes, they are honored in traditional ceremonies and revered in storytelling.

Even today, I feel the embrace of my ancestors reminding me why our nonhuman relatives deserve respect – because the creator put them here to live.

For centuries, wolves have been exploited for their furs, killed in the name of protecting people, livestock and game species and nearly eliminated through government-sponsored actions. Decades of hard work by states, tribes and stakeholders on the ground, along with federal protections, successfully recovered gray wolves after two centuries of decline to the brink of extinction.

As secretary of the Interior, I am committed to ensuring that wolves have the conservation they need to survive and thrive in the wild based on science and law. I am also committed to keeping communities safe and reducing wolf conflicts with ranchers. It is critical that we all recognize that our nation’s wolf populations are integral to the health of fragile ecosystems and hold significant cultural importance in our shared heritage.

We are alarmed by recent reports from Montana, where so far this season nearly 20 gray wolves that set foot outside of Yellowstone National Park have been killed. This happened because the state recently removed longstanding rules in areas adjacent to the park, which were effective in protecting Yellowstone wolves that do not recognize boundary lines on a map.

We have communicated to state officials that these kinds of actions jeopardize the decades of federal and state partnerships that successfully recovered gray wolves in the northern Rockies.

The law requires that states uphold reserved tribal treaty rights. Therefore, in the case of the Ojibwe Tribes in Wisconsin, the Interior Department formally requested that the state consult and coordinate with the tribes when making wolf management decisions and respect the tribes’ right to conserve rather than kill wolves. We will take similar actions on behalf of other tribes where necessary.

Finally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has authority under the Endangered Species Act to protect threatened and endangered species. Thanks in large part to this bedrock environmental law, gray wolves recovered from near extinction to current numbers that exceeded expectations. Because of the gray wolf’s recovery, individual states are responsible for its welfare and sustaining that recovery. Nevertheless, we will reinstate federal protections under the ESA for the northern Rocky Mountains’ gray wolf, if necessary.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is evaluating whether a re-listing of the northern Rocky Mountains’ gray wolf population under the Endangered Species Act is necessary.

Recent laws passed in some Western states undermine state wildlife managers by promoting precipitous reductions in wolf populations, such as removing bag limits, baiting, snaring, night hunting and pursuit by dogs— the same kind of practices that nearly wiped out wolves during the last century. In response, last September the Fish and Wildlife Service began a 12-month analysis to determine, guided by science and the law, whether reinstating ESA protections is warranted.

We also have the ability to act swiftly to protect gray wolves if science indicates that there is an emergency posing a significant risk to the well-being of the species. In such an emergency, the Fish and Wildlife Service can immediately list the species for 240 days. We are closely monitoring data on wolf populations and will make those determinations if merited using the best available science.

Gray wolf recovery has been an American conservation success story. The continued recovery of gray wolves depends on the cooperation of wildlife managers at the state, tribal and federal levels, and a reliance on the best available science to guide management decisions. The clock is ticking. We must find solutions that allow wolves to flourish, even while we balance the needs of hunters and ranchers and others who live and work along with wolves on the landscape.

My Pueblo ancestors taught me to live with courage, respect our ecosystems and protect our families – the very same virtues that wolves embody. From our public lands to our vast oceans, and all the creatures that live within them, I will continue to work hard for our nation’s wildlife and its habitats, because we were meant to all coexist on this earth – the only place we all call home.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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Steve Irwin was best-known as the crocodile hunter. His enthusiasm for the natural world was contagious. He would be proud to know that two young Australians are doing their best to fill his shoes. They are doing a tremendous job and making an enormous impact.

Daniel Clarke and his family had a deep respect for fellow Australian Steve Irwin—the crocodile hunter. They were greatly saddened when Irwin died from a stingray barb in September 2006. Shortly thereafter, 10-year-old Daniel watched Irwin’s production about orangutan conservation, which sparked a passion and a remarkable mission within Daniel, who has cerebral palsy.

“Steve Irwin was my inspiration,” Daniel said. “I was devastated when he died.”

In 2007, the Starlight Foundation granted Daniel a wish. His wish was extraordinary.

“I want to save the orangutan in Borneo and Sumatra,” Daniel said.

The Starlight Foundation met to discuss the impact of Daniel’s wish. After several days, The Foundation called to explain that they never had a child who wanted such a selfless wish.

The Starlight Foundation tried to accommodate Daniel’s wish, but saving an endangered species that lives in the jungles of Indonesia and Malaysia is not a simple task for a young man or a million men, especially when the species in question is in the crosshairs of agricultural expansion, logging and corruption. Given the complexity of the challenge, Daniel compromised and took a trip with his family to the Australia Zoo, which ignited Daniel’s passion for orangutan conservation even more.

Daniel’s family found The Orangutan Project (TOP), which “adopts” orangutans for $55 per year. Daniel adopted an orangutan and encouraged others to do the same. Then he decided to raise $10,000 to help save orangutans. His school principal helped him develop a fundraising event, which raised $5,500 for TOP. The conservation organization named Daniel as the National Children’s Ambassador.

In 2008, The Starlight Foundation invited Daniel’s family to see a Rugby Union Football match between the Wallabies and Wales. He met former Australian Prime Minister John Howard after the game. Howard listened to Daniel’s explanation of his quest to save the orangutan. The Prime Minister later pledged $500,000 over four years to an American Non-Government Organization to help save the orangutan.

Thanks to an anonymous sponsor, Daniel and William made their first of two trips to Borneo to see orangutans in the wild and in rehabilitation. They wrote a book about the experience .

Tears In The Jungle: A Children’s Adventure to Save the Orangutan is a way for readers to learn about the environment and understand how they can make a difference. Faced with their own challenges, the Clarke brothers tell the story of their trek through the jungles of Borneo to see orangutans and the people who are defending them.

The Clarke brothers have raised close to $1 million for orangutan conservation. They have sponsored more than 111,000 acres of orangutan habitat and they have helped adopt more than 100 orangutans. Money raised through book sales supports The Orangutan Project, Borneo Orangutan Survival Australia, and Orangutan Foundation International. These organizations focus on orangutan rescue, rehabilitation and release programs as well as habitat protection.

To learn more about the Clarke brothers and their remarkable mission to save orangutans and their critical habitat, please visit https://sacredseedlings.com/brothers-team-up-to-save-orangutan-habitat/

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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Colorado and the entire American West have gone through a massive transformation over the past 150 years. Westward expansion came at the expense of Native Americans, wildlife, forests and entire ecosystems. Buffalo were nearly driven into extinction on the American plains, which caused the death and displacement of thousands of Native Americans.

Wolves, cougars, coyotes and grizzly bears were all demonized by cattlemen and sheepherders.

Forests, including much of California’s giant sequoias, were cut down to build homes and create more space for agriculture. Afterall, it was America’s manifest destiny. Our forefathers and their offspring were brainwashed into thinking that they were on a mission from God. Unfortunately, they were on a mission to capitalize on, and destroy, everything that God created.

Unfortunately, much of the damage cannot be undone. Fortunately, citizens across the American West are rising up and demanding accountability. They are demanding restoration where possible. We have a very long way to go, but it all starts with our collective conscience and our common compass.

Colorado, for example, just took an important step backward in time. A majority of citizens just passed an initiative to restore native wolf populations west of the Continental Divide–Colorado’s western slope. It will be the first time in nearly 80 years that wolves will be officially welcome in Colorado.

Thanks to voter approval, Proposition 114 directs state wildlife managers to reintroduce gray wolves to the Western Slope.

According to supporters, it’s the first time voters — in any state — have decided whether to bring back an endangered species.

The new law requires the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to create a plan to reintroduce and manage gray wolves on designated lands west of the continental divide by the end of 2023. The commission must:

• Develop a plan to reintroduce gray wolves using the best scientific data available;
• Hold hearings across the state to gather information to be used in developing the plan;
• Update the plan after obtaining public input periodically; and
• Reintroduce wolves on designated lands by December 31, 2023.

The commission will determine the exact location of wolf reintroductions. The Flat Tops Wilderness area and the Weminuche Wilderness area both demand consideration.

The measure directs the state legislature to fund the reintroduction program. The commission will compensate owners of livestock for any losses caused by wolves. The commission cannot impose any new restrictions on private landowners regarding land, water, or resource use to support the plan. The commission must prepare a report with data on the potential economic and ecological impacts of reintroduction, projected survival rates of the animals being reintroduced, and the potential impacts of not reintroducing the animal.

Gray wolves perform important ecological functions that impact other plants and animals. Without them, deer and elk can over-graze sensitive habitats such as riverbanks, leading to declines in ecosystem health. Leftover prey can also provide food for other scavengers such as birds and smaller mammals.

Wolves can help contain chronic wasting disease among deer, elk and moose.

Wolves can take down sick animals faster than left alone to die of the disease. Since the bodily fluids and tissue of sick animals are infectious, the sooner that sick animals are taken down the better. This can help minimize prion contamination in the environment (it appears that wolves are resistant, if not immune, to prion disease). Most mammals, including humans, are not immune to prion disease. Infected wildlife can infect each other, livestock and humans. It’s a vicious circle that is being mismanaged in many ways. Wolves can help minimize prion pathways.

Wolves can help support a healthy environment upon which Coloradans depend. Reintroduction is necessary to ensure that a permanent gray wolf population is restored to western Colorado. Through eradication efforts such as bounty programs, gray wolves were eliminated in Colorado by the 1940s. While there have been sightings in Colorado, it is uncertain gray wolves will establish a permanent population on their own. The measure aligns with other states’ successful recovery efforts while considering Colorado’s interests.”

Gray wolves once inhabited most of the U.S., including Colorado. By the 1930s, gray wolves were eradicated from most of the western U.S, due to predator control programs and habitat destruction. As mentioned earlier, a trapper killed last gray wolves in Colorado around 1940.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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Ecosystems around the world are on the verge of collapse. Deforestation alone is promoting extinction and climate change. It is a planetary emergency.

Humans have wiped out 83 percent of wild mammals and half of all plants and severely altered three-quarters of ice-free land and two-thirds of marine environments. One million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades – a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.

The World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as one of the top five threats humanity will face in the next ten years. Human societies and economies rely on biodiversity in fundamental ways. Our research shows that $44 trillion of economic value generation – over half the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.

Nature loss matters for most businesses – through impacts on operations, supply chains, and markets.

We have the power to change. Humanity urgently needs to rethink its relationship with nature, in order to halt and reverse the alarming degradation of the natural world. Business leaders have a crucial role to play, by putting nature at the core of their processes and decision-making and systematically identifying, assessing, mitigating and disclosing nature-related risks to avoid severe consequences. Businesses can be part of the global movement to protect and restore nature.

Despite an increasing focus on nature loss, there is still a limited understanding of why it matters to businesses and what the private sector can practically do about it. The World Economic Forum is launching a series of New Nature Economy (NNE) reports in 2020, making the business and economic case for safeguarding nature. The series aims to catalyse public-private momentum in 2020, with a focus on the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s milestone summit (COP15) in Kunming, China, and the related Business for Nature mobilization.

Nature Risk Rising, the first report in the NNE series, explains how nature-related risks matter to business, why they must be urgently mainstreamed into risk management strategies and why it is vital to prioritize the protection of nature’s assets and services within the broader global economic growth agenda.

The 15th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report is published as critical risks are manifesting.

The global economy is facing an increased risk of stagnation, climate change is striking harder and more rapidly than expected, and fragmented cyberspace threatens the full potential of next-generation technologies — all while citizens worldwide protest political and economic conditions and voice concerns about systems that exacerbate inequality. The challenges before us demand immediate collective action, but fractures within the global community appear to only be widening. Stakeholders need to act quickly and with purpose within an unsettled global landscape.

Read The Full Story

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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By Jason Hickel, Foreign Policy

Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations.

These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse.

Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. definition.

It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. There’s just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible.

Green growth first became a buzz phrase in 2012 at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. In the run-up to the conference, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the U.N. Environment Program all produced reports promoting green growth. Today, it is a core plank of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

But the promise of green growth turns out to have been based more on wishful thinking than on evidence.

In the years since the Rio conference, three major empirical studies have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use is not possible on a global scale.

A team of scientists led by the German researcher Monika Dittrich first raised doubts in 2012. The group ran a sophisticated computer model that predicted what would happen to global resource use if economic growth continued on its current trajectory, increasing at about 2 to 3 percent per year. It found that human consumption of natural resources (including fish, livestock, forests, metals, minerals, and fossil fuels) would rise from 70 billion metric tons per year in 2012 to 180 billion metric tons per year by 2050. For reference, a sustainable level of resource use is about 50 billion metric tons per year—a boundary we breached back in 2000.

The team then reran the model to see what would happen if every nation on Earth immediately adopted best practice in efficient resource use (an extremely optimistic assumption). The results improved; resource consumption would hit only 93 billion metric tons by 2050. But that is still a lot more than we’re consuming today. Burning through all those resources could hardly be described as absolute decoupling or green growth.

In 2016, a second team of scientists tested a different premise: one in which the world’s nations all agreed to go above and beyond existing best practice. In their best-case scenario, the researchers assumed a tax that would raise the global price of carbon from $50 to $236 per metric ton and imagined technological innovations that would double the efficiency with which we use resources. The results were almost exactly the same as in Dittrich’s study. Under these conditions, if the global economy kept growing by 3 percent each year, we’d still hit about 95 billion metric tons of resource use by 2050. Bottom line: no absolute decoupling.

Finally, last year the U.N. Environment Program—once one of the main cheerleaders of green growth theory—weighed in on the debate. It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per metric ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support. The result? We hit 132 billion metric tons by 2050. This finding is worse than those of the two previous studies because the researchers accounted for the “rebound effect,” whereby improvements in resource efficiency drive down prices and cause demand to rise—thus canceling out some of the gains.

Study after study shows the same thing. Scientists are beginning to realize that there are physical limits to how efficiently we can use resources. Sure, we might be able to produce cars and iPhones and skyscrapers more efficiently, but we can’t produce them out of thin air. We might shift the economy to services such as education and yoga, but even universities and workout studios require material inputs. 

We might shift the economy to services such as education and yoga, but even universities and workout studios require material inputs. Once we reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing any degree of economic growth drives resource use back up.

These problems throw the entire concept of green growth into doubt and necessitate some radical rethinking. Remember that each of the three studies used highly optimistic assumptions. We are nowhere near imposing a global carbon tax today, much less one of nearly $600 per metric ton, and resource efficiency is currently getting worse, not better. Yet the studies suggest that even if we do everything right, decoupling economic growth with resource use will remain elusive and our environmental problems will continue to worsen.

Preventing that outcome will require a whole new paradigm. High taxes and technological innovation will help, but they’re not going to be enough. The only realistic shot humanity has at averting ecological collapse is to impose hard caps on resource use, as the economist Daniel O’Neill recently proposed. Such caps, enforced by national governments or by international treaties, could ensure that we do not extract more from the land and the seas than the Earth can safely regenerate. We could also ditch GDP as an indicator of economic success and adopt a more balanced measure like the genuine progress indicator (GPI), which accounts for pollution and natural asset depletion.

Using GPI would help us maximize socially good outcomes while minimizing ecologically bad ones.

But there’s no escaping the obvious conclusion. Ultimately, bringing our civilization back within planetary boundaries is going to require that we liberate ourselves from our dependence on economic growth—starting with rich nations. This might sound scarier than it really is. Ending growth doesn’t mean shutting down economic activity—it simply means that next year we can’t produce and consume more than we are doing this year. It might also mean shrinking certain sectors that are particularly damaging to our ecology and that are unnecessary for human flourishing, such as advertising, commuting, and single-use products.

But ending growth doesn’t mean that living standards need to take a hit. Our planet provides more than enough for all of us; the problem is that its resources are not equally distributed. We can improve people’s lives right now simply by sharing what we already have more fairly, rather than plundering the Earth for more. Maybe this means better public services. Maybe it means basic income. Maybe it means a shorter working week that allows us to scale down production while still delivering full employment. Policies such as these—and countless others—will be crucial to not only surviving the 21st century but also flourishing in it.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications. He is the author of several books about health and environmental issues from around the world. He also is the author of the Language and Travel Guide To Indonesia.

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The recent seizure of 645 illegally obtained and trafficked wolf pelts from Greece at Beijing’s Capital International Airport is a commendable act by the China’s General Administration of Customs. Together with other recent seizures of elephant tusks and rhino horns in Hong Kong, the Chinese government has shown the world its growing efforts to combat the illicit wildlife trade.

These recent actions are particularly laudable because China occupies a pivotal strategic position in the global fight for wildlife protection.

China is rich in biodiversity, and is a top market for wildlife and its parts.

Effective enforcement of China’s Law on the Protection of Wildlife and honoring its obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species serve to protect Chinese indigenous species and those in other countries.

In recent years, China has faced the daunting task of stopping the influx of wildlife contraband and protecting the threatened species within its national borders. Chinese authorities have faced a challenging situation that has invited misunderstanding and, oftentimes, accusations.

Historically and globally, demand for expensive wildlife products follows economic prosperity. China’s rise as an economic superpower has brought with it new “status vices.” Some people with income to spare spend it on lavish and often outlandish wildlife luxury goods like rhino horn and elephant ivory. While economic prosperity is good for a nation and its people, it may spell doom for wildlife species.

China is not immune to this problem and is not alone. The US and other countries went through similar episodes during their economic development.

With the global economic balance of power shifting eastward, the rising purchasing power in East Asia has made it a new destination for illegal ivory and other wildlife products.

Ivory carving is a time-honored skill in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Governments in this rapidly modernizing region are engaged in finding a way to balance preserving cultural traditions while safeguarding the Earth’s rarest creatures for future generations. Today, all ivory carving facilities in China must be approved by the government.

A long-running debate on the Chinese Internet asks if elements of cultural tradition must evolve with the new challenges faced in the contemporary era.

There are voices for passing the ivory-carving skill to the younger generation. However, it is a shortsighted choice to allow questionable traditional practices to continue if it causes negative impact on the long-term sustainability of the global ecosystem.

China’s implementation of an ivory product identification system represents a political determination to discourage the expansion of the ivory-carving business, a wise policy decision.

As the single biggest investor in Africa, China bears responsibility to the continent’s people and wildlife.

Demand in East Asia for ivory, rhino horn and other animal products needs to be addressed, both through education and enforcement.

Moonlighting as an ivory trader, out of ignorance or deliberately, violates international laws, and is costly and hugely irresponsible. It can also damage the reputation of the law-abiding Chinese business community working hard to expand its rightful operations in the continent.

Furthermore, reports of the involvement of organized militia and terrorist groups in elephant poaching are highly troubling and could fuel instability and undermine regional security. This concerns the national interest of many countries including China.

A series of Chinese government initiatives, international partnerships, strengthened customs enforcement, and increased Chinese public concern provide strong evidence of change in the country.

As a vital force in the global alliance for wildlife protection, China’s growing commitment and efforts to combat illicit trafficking can save elephants and rhinos from extinction, while inviting global commendation for its efforts.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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The best way to control wolf populations and minimize livestock predation may be to stop shooting, trapping and poisoning them, Washington State University researchers say.

A review of 25 years of data from lethal control programs from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services found that shooting and trapping the carnivores leads to more dead sheep and cattle in subsequent years, rather than less.

Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, WSU wildlife biologist Rob Wielgus and data analyst Kaylie Peebles say that, for each wolf killed, the odds of more livestock depredations increase significantly.

Predator control and sport hunting are often used to reduce predator populations and livestock depredations, – but the efficacy of lethal control has rarely been tested.

We assessed the effects of wolf mortality on reducing livestock depredations in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming from 1987–2012 using a 25 year time series. The number of livestock depredated, livestock populations, wolf population estimates, number of breeding pairs, and wolves killed were calculated for the wolf-occupied area of each state for each year.

The trend continues until 25 percent of the wolves in an area are killed, a rate of removal that is unsustainable for maintaining the species. Researchers found that killing one wolf increases the odds of depredations four percent for sheep and five to six per cent for cattle the following year. If 20 wolves are killed, livestock deaths double.

Researchers found that lethal controls of cougars also backfire, disrupting their populations so much that younger, less disciplined cougars attack more livestock.

Wielgus did not expect to see the same result with wolves.

“I had no idea what the results were going to be, positive or negative,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s take a look at it and see what happened.’ I was surprised that there was a big effect.”

Wielgus said the wolf killings likely disrupt the social cohesion of the pack. While an intact breeding pair will keep young offspring from mating, disruption can set sexually mature wolves free to breed, leading to an increase in breeding pairs. As they have pups, they become bound to one place and can’t hunt deer and elk as freely. Occasionally, they turn to livestock.

Wielgus said wolves generally account for between .1 percent and .6 percent of all livestock deaths — a minor threat compared to other predators, disease, accidents and the dangers of calving. He encourages more non-lethal interventions like guard dogs, “range riders” on horseback, flags, spotlights and “risk maps” that discourage grazing animals in hard-to-protect, wolf-rich areas.

“The only way you’re going to completely eliminate livestock depredations is to get rid of all the wolves,” Wielgus said, “and society has told us that that’s not going to happen.”

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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