Howling at the Moon

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF JIM AND JAMIE DUTCHER “LIVING WITH WOLVES”

Idaho’s new wolf rules are a turning point for wildlife management and conservation

BY HARRISON BERRY

In drafting their controversial wolf management bill during the 2021 legislative session, Idaho lawmakers and industry leaders charted a narrow course: stunt population growth without raising the ire of you-know-who.

“We don’t want the feds to come back and say, ‘We want to control the wolves,’” says rancher and Idaho Senator Mark Harris (R-Soda Springs), who co-sponsored the bill. “We want the State [of Idaho] to control the wolves. And frankly, this bill wouldn’t go that far.”

Read the headlines, though, and the rules — signed into law in May by Governor Brad Little, who is himself a rancher — cut things close, with the media and observers estimating that it would enable the killing of up to 90% of Idaho’s 1,500 wolves. The law’s proponents describe it as an important tool for limiting the harm to flocks and herds by predators; for its critics, it’s a brutal, cynical policy that harms the ecosystem and thumbs its nose at wildlife management. At issue is the role of government in some of Idaho’s wildest places, and with these guidelines, the state now gives permissions where it once imposed protections.

The law eliminates a 15-wolf-per-year kill limit on hunters and trappers, and empowers the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board to hire private contractors to kill problem wolves that harass livestock.

The law eliminates a 15-wolf-per-year kill limit on hunters and trappers, and empowers the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board to hire private contractors to kill problem wolves that harass livestock. It also makes wolf-trapping season yearround and lifts many restrictions on how wolves are killed: Any method used to kill other canines is now fair game for wolves. The intention, advocates say, is to keep the population as low as the state’s wolf management plan allows.

Rancher John Peterson says that more aggressive predator management is needed. He’s also the president of the Idaho Wool Growers Association, which, along with other groups like the Idaho Farm Bureau, had a hand in crafting the original bill, SB1211. Most of the challenges to livestock maintenance, like keeping animals healthy and secure, are the responsibility of ranchers themselves. And there are few rules when it comes to killing really pesky predators like coyotes. Since the federal government reintroduced wolves to Idaho in 1995, control over their population has moved from the feds to the State of Idaho, which, with the passage of SB1211, has freed the hands of cattle ranchers and sheep ranchers to protect their livestock and financial interests.

“As a manager of sheep, we vaccinate, we shed. All of our management practices — we do everything we can to keep every sheep alive and healthy,” Peterson says. “I don’t want to kill wolves, but as far as managing sheep and staying in business, I have to defend my sheep from predators. If we have to reduce [wolf] numbers to do that, that’s what we’ve got to do.”

Prior to the passage of the bill, wolf predation didn’t have much of an effect on the bottom line. The Western Livestock Journal pegs depredation losses between cattle and sheep at an average of 113 wolf kills annually between 2018 and 2020. That’s out of a total 2.73 million cattle and sheep in the Gem State. Wolves accounted for 3% of all sheep loss, or $154,000 in damages, in 2018, according to the 2019 National Agricultural Statistics Service. That same year, coyotes accounted for 18.9% of sheep loss totaling $981,000 in damages, and weather conditions killed twice as many sheep as wolves.

In response to the passage of the law, four major national groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, the Humane Society Legislative Fund, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity, launched a petition for the federal government to reinstate Endangered Species Act protections for wolves, describing the new law as a move to “appease the livestock industry and trophy hunters” by “risk[ing] wolves disappearing from the West again.”

That may sound like a shot across the bow of the law’s supporters, but critics have mixed views on whether the law will green-light enough wolf kills to prompt federal intervention. Among the skeptics is Brian Brooks, executive director of sporting and conservation group the Idaho Wildlife Federation, who said it would take radical methods like poison to reduce the purported goal of 90% reduction in wolf population, and that the methods for killing and trapping allowed under the new rules “isn’t going to get them close” to the 90% decline projected by some. Rather, the law is the opposite of wolf management, pulling responsibility for wild animals out of the hands of biologists and putting it into those of lawmakers.

“We don’t think that the legislature has the expertise, scientific literacy, or the ability to interpret science to be making significant policy regarding the management of Idaho’s wildlife, much like this bill. We think that’s a dangerous precedent,” he says.

Others, including Carter Niemeyer, who retired after 33 years of working in predator control for the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and the Interior, take a similar stance, that wolves have become a political football — “retribution to the federal government for reintroducing an animal the states didn’t want.” Like Brooks, he says that one peril of Idaho’s tack will be the deprofessionalization of the state’s wolf management, and the state will likely see an increase in the inappropriate hunting and trapping of the animals.

Decades spent around predatory animals taught Niemeyer their role in the ecosystem. Listen to proponents of sterner wolf management, he says, and wolves are slaughtering livestock and driving elk herds into cattle and sheep grazing areas; but following their lead will result in lax enforcement of what rules are left and a tide of inhumane animal killings. “When you turn it over to amateur trappers, who knows what they’ll do? When you turn this loose to contractors, I’d say all bets are off,” he says.

On the other side of the issue are those who dedicate their lives to advocating for wolves in the wilderness. Garrick Dutcher is the Research & Program Director at Living With Wolves, a non-profit co-founded by his parents, Jim and Jamie Dutcher, who lived with the Sawtooth Pack for six years and beautifully documented the animals’ in the film, Wolves At Our Door, a winner of two, primetime Emmy awards. Garrick has followed the reintroduction and recovery of wolves in Yellowstone and central Idaho closely. He and his wife also took home a primetime Emmy for their documentary Wolf: Return of a Legend. Garrick’s nonprofit conducts education and outreach around the wolves. His voice echoes many as an implacable wolves defender and strong opponent to Bill SB1211. Dutcher held no illusion that it would fail to clear the Statehouse; but when Governor Little signed it into law, he felt a swell of emotion.

The West, he says, had been settled in blood, and he invoked images of riflemen shooting bison from trains and the decimation of apex predators. Federal management had struck a new balance between wildlife and people, but in the new rules he saw a return to the days of government acquiescence to industry.

The American West is not to be a sterilized landscape. That’s not what the American public wants. That’s not even what Idahoans want.

“It’s a rancher’s bill written by ranchers and signed by a rancher,” Dutcher says. “The American West is not to be a sterilized landscape. That’s not what the American public wants. That’s not even what Idahoans want.”