Sticking To The Plan

We couldn’t agree more with this editorial that ran in the Oregonian yesterday (see below). Sadly, the wolves from the Imnaha pack learned to prey on livestock and repeatedly killed cattle on private land, despite the use of deterrents to break this pattern. The state wolf management plan is clear about the removal of wolves involved in chronic livestock predation.  We don’t want any wolves killed and are working to successfully reduce livestock and wolf conflicts, thereby reducing the loss of both livestock and wolves. But the long-term success of wolf recovery in Oregon will depend on carefully following the state wolf plan, which garnered broad public support, including from Defenders.

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Howls aside, stick to the wolf plan

By The Oregonian Editorial Board

The toughest government job in Oregon today may be the state wildlife biologists caught in the middle of the fierce struggle over the return of wolves in the Northeast corner of the state.

They’re getting it from all sides: Wallowa County ranchers complaining that state biologists are refusing to confirm reports of wolf-killed livestock, conservation groups upset about the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s decision to target two more wolves for preying on cattle, lawmakers meddling with bills to amend the state’s wolf plan.

Everyone’s unhappy, but Idaho, Montana and Wyoming already have been down this trail, and shown there’s no other way to reintroduce wolves. The conflicts are inevitable: Some wolves are going to prey on livestock, some will need to be tracked down and killed, and some ranchers will need to be compensated for their losses.

Oregon is fortunate that it had the time and foresight to agree on an actual wolf plan, a fair one, a good one, to guide wolf reintroduction. And everyone involved in this issue ought to take a deep breath, reread the plan, and stop pounding on the wildlife biologists doing their best to implement it.

Oregonians have agreed to allow a small number of wolves — four breeding pairs — to repopulate the east side of the state. That’s happening, in fits and starts, with the known wolf population first climbing perhaps into the 20s, then falling to 17, and now down to a dozen or so. Wolf supporters want more, and want it sooner, but nature and wolf politics require the long view.

The wolf plan also clearly gives state wildlife biologists the authority to determine when wolves need to be removed. And that, too, is happening: State biologists already have culled two from the problem pack, the wolves roaming the Imnaha Valley of Wallowa County. And on Friday, after confirming a calf killed on private land near Joseph, they announced that two more wolves would be killed. By the time you read this, those two might be gone.

That’s as it should be. This is Oregon’s wolf plan in action, and, yes, there are contradictions in an official policy that welcomes wolves back to the state and yet requires that some of them be shot dead for typical wolf behaviors.

But there’s no other way to go about this. And we’d urge everyone, especially the angry ranchers and others living at ground zero of wolf recovery, to allow the wolf plan to work as designed. It won’t help to heap more public pressure on state wildlife biologists, or attack their credibility and claim they are not impartial arbiters in wolf kills. Nor will it help to blame wolves for any and all livestock deaths — an overwhelming percentage of which are due to dogs, coyotes, cougars and factors that existed long before the first wolf crossed the Snake River into Oregon. If the new state livestock compensation program comes under too much pressure and fails, it won’t result in the reversal of Oregon’s wolf reintroduction policy. It will lead instead to a rewrite and a tightening of the rancher compensation program.

Everything we’ve seen — the confirmations of livestock kills, the hard decision to remove wolves and break up the Imnaha pack — suggests that Oregon’s wolf plan is working as designed. It also suggests that the advocacy groups ought to stop hounding state wildlife biologists, and let them do their jobs.