Last week, Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Washington, introduced H.R. 1985, a bill that would prohibit gray wolves in Washington, Oregon, and Utah from receiving the protections as individuals of an endangered species that federal law partially entitles them to. The purpose of H.R. 1985 is to allow gray wolves to be hunted or poisoned and killed. The justification for this is that wolves attack livestock, and that’s bad for ranchers.
Attacks on livestock from wolves are actually rare, when compared to attacks from coyotes, cougars and feral dogs. The most recently available USDA report on predation on cattle, for example, finds that only 3.7 percent of losses of cattle from predators were due to wolf attacks. Vultures killed thousands more cattle than wolves did. Hunters could kill all the wolves in North America, and predation on livestock would continue with little noticeable change.
That same report found that attacks by all predator species caused less than half the number of cattle deaths as the neglect of ranchers who allowed their animals to remain unprotected during extremely harsh weather. In Representative Newhouse’s state of Washington, cattle death from all predators was just 4.6% of the number of cattle death from other causes – and deaths from wolves were at less than 1%.
Is this really a problem that demands federal legislation? Even if you think so, the fact is that Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves have already been removed in parts of Washington, Oregon and Utah, by a bit of legislation that was slipped into a larger budget bill four years ago.
Besides, methods of reducing loss of livestock to predation by wolves other than killing the wolves are available, and proven to work. Certain breeds of herd dogs have been proven to be strong deterents to wolf attacks, for instance. Also, the practice of something called fladry, which involves hanging strange objects that wolves don’t understand, have been proven to keep many of the predators away from livestock.
These alternative methods are clever, but they don’t have the swagger effect for a politician like Dan Newhouse, who prefers to talk tough about getting rid of varmints to finding intelligent solutions to the occasional problems wolves cause.