64 and counting: wolves in Wallowa

By Envision Magazine on May 22, 2014

 

 

Words by Anna Smith
Multimedia by Kyle McKee

 

As the population of Oregon wolves grows, so does the tension between ranchers who want more leeway to protect livestock, and conservationists who claim that wolves have an intrinsic right to the land.

The old flatbed truck pitches up and down, slowly rolling along over the hummocky ground like a landlocked ship. A sea of hungry cows fans out before rancher Todd Nash who drives slowly through the crowd as his farmhand flakes shards of hay bale off the bed of the truck. As the cows waddle past, Nash mentions how he bought that one from so-and-so, or how that one had twin calves two years in a row.

 

 

“Almost all these cows have a story affiliated with them,” Nash says, his soft blue eyes surveying his herd. “It seems like there’d be too many of them for that, but I know them all pretty well.” A chilly wind whips around the herd swirling light drifts of snowflakes onto their backs as the Wallowa Mountains stand dark blue and cold in the distance, rimming the valley. Nash sees a cluster of cows who haven’t joined the rest for breakfast and drives over to discover a calf born just that morning in the blustering cold, the afterbirth still laying on the frozen ground.

“I never get tired of seeing a new calf,” Nash says in a deep country drawl. “They struggle to their feet; they nurse their mom; it’s miraculous. There’s nothing short of that.”

The next cow he inspects is a thin black cow with a limp and visible scars over her hind flanks and legs. Nash explains that she “still has some owies” from when she had been pregnant and an animal attacked her while grazing. Although she survived, she lost her calf, and her wounds caused her market value to drop. Nash estimates that he lost $2,700 in the attack. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) investigated and found the evidence of a wolf attack to be inconclusive despite Nash’s conviction that it was a wolf. In accordance with the Oregon Wolf Management Plan, Nash will not receive any compensation for the monetary loss, nor for the many other instances of missing or injured cattle that he and other ranchers claim were caused by wolves.

 

 

According to the Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan, wolves played a “pivotal role” in early Oregon government structures, as rural gatherings about how to deal with threats from wolves gradually shaped into general town hall meetings. In 1913, the Oregon State Game Commission started offering $20 wolf bounties in addition to the $5 that the state paid per wolf kill. This incentive, mixed with the incalculable force of Manifest Destiny, resulted in the elimination of wolves in Oregon by the 1940s. After a 60-year absence, the wolf population in Oregon now hovers at 64 gray wolves. They live in eight distinct packs, all concentrated in the northeast, where raising livestock is a common livelihood.

The Oregon Wolf Plan, described as a “social compromise” by those familiar with the politics behind the plan, gives ranchers compensation for livestock after ODFW confirms that the cause of death was a wolf attack. However the plan does not allow a rancher to shoot wolves on their property or near their livestock unless the wolf is caught in the act of killing, and ranchers say this never happens.

To date, 81 livestock animals have been confirmed as wolf kills, and four wolves have been killed by the state of Oregon. The Oregon Wolf Plan explicitly states that the state neither supports reintroduction of wolves back into Oregon, nor extermination. Rather, it is trying to mediate between people and wolves and allow an endangered species to reach sustainable levels.

Enterprise, Oregon is where most of the physical and social conflicts that dominate the wolf debate occur. With a population of 1,940 it is simultaneously the largest town in Wallowa County and a town where everybody knows everybody. The ranching heritage is firmly entrenched in the soil here, and the countryside is divided into hundred-acre pastures dotted with cattle and sheep, right up to the 359,991 acre Eagle Cap Wilderness in the Wallowa Mountains. The rural culture in Enterprise is evident in the small, ranching houses, the old-fashioned courthouses, and the pickups that dominate the two-lane highways. Cattle dogs ride on the back of flatbed trucks, and people who have lived there for decades are still considered newcomers.

Nash has been ranching in Wallowa County for 22 years, and leads the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association Wolf Task Force, an organization committed to “defending ranchers’ rights to protect their livestock from wolf depredation,” according to their website. He sells his cows to Painted Hills Natural Beef, which distributes to natural food stores throughout the Pacific Northwest. Nash takes pride in his profession and his livestock, a hallmark characteristic of the ranchers here.

 

 

“We make decisions here everyday based on economics, morals, and good animal husbandry. To me, a wolf dragging down your cattle and you not doing anything about it breaches all three of those.”

“In the Northwest we have some of the best cattle, and I don’t say that braggadociously, it’s just a fact,” he says as he furrows his brows. Nash is a vocal proponent of killing wolves that prey on livestock, and is deeply frustrated with how the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife investigates cases of lost cattle.

Officers from ODFW often find loopholes or nuances in the case so that it can’t be counted as a confirmed kill, Nash says, due to the Wolf Plan’s complicated requirements for the kill to be counted. Compensation is not the only reason kill counts are important to ranchers—four confirmed losses within the span of six months authorizes ODFW to kill a wolf.

Conservationists and wolf advocates see these requirements as necessary, however, to ensure that killing wolves is an absolute last resort. Rob Klavins of Oregon Wild, a Portland-based organization that works to protect Oregon’s wild lands and wildlife, believes that the Oregon Wolf Plan is more political than scientific. Originally from the Midwest and in his mid-thirties, Klavins’ has been working on the wolf issue in Oregon since the beginning.

“The wolf has become a surrogate for these battles of the rural/urban divide in Oregon, of the size and role of the federal government, and personal freedom: who can tell me what I can and can’t shoot?” Klavins says firmly. “Wolves are a native species—they have rightful place in the landscape, they play an irreplaceable role in the ecosystem—but we don’t have that discussion because they’re caught up in this almost tribal battle between the Tea Party and terrible latté–sipping liberals in Portland.”

 

 

Wally Sykes, a self-described lone wolf advocate in Joseph, Oregon, is one of those trying to help the wolf population survive and thrive. Sykes has been involved with Oregon’s wolf issues since 2007, when his dog got caught in a trap while out hiking. Having lived in Joseph for 18 years, Sykes is still considered a newcomer, not in the least because of his views on wolves.

“I empathize, but I don’t really sympathize,” Sykes says of the ranchers’ predicament. “You are never going to keep wolves from preying on livestock. That’s one reason why I don’t like this ‘kill a wolf’ thing, because I don’t think it’s going to work. What you have to do is accept losses without going out and taking out a wolf pack.” Sykes believes that these losses can be curbed by a few methods: the state’s compensation program, non-lethal preventative measures, and by breeding different cows. But on a fundamental level, Sykes says that the cattle industry is based on an artificial system of government subsidies and lax environmental standards.

The importance of wolves, Sykes says, is immeasurable, seen in the way that ecosystems change when apex predators such as wolves disappear. Called a “trophic cascade,” this phenomenon causes wildlife populations to fluctuate and sends the food web into disorder.

Sykes and his wolf-dog hybrid, Kumo, patrol the wilderness and prairies surrounding Enterprise looking for signs of wolves. Sykes says that Kumo knows OR-4, the alpha male of the Imnaha Pack, by his scent from their outings. Although Sykes has drawn the ire of many who oppose the reintroduction of wolves, Kumo himself has been the subject of insult, being described in an angry letter-to-the-editor in the local paper as an “overweight wolf.” Snarky weight comments aside, Sykes does say that the wolf in Kumo is very apparent in the way he reacts to commands. Sykes calls Kumo “unbiddable,” meaning that sometimes the dog in him will do what Sykes wants, and other times the wolf will do what he’d like.

This disregard for human authority is a root cause of the fear surrounding wolves; it issomething that author Marybeth Holleman says is a major factor in the way we deal with wolves today.

“We need to break through some of our old stories,” Holleman explains. “We have some entrenched mythologies about wolves and about other predators that we share the land with.”

Holleman is co-author of Among Wolves, a book that documents researcher Dr. Gordon Haber’s 40-year-old observations and research on gray wolves in Alaska’s Denali National Park. “[The wolf debate] is people saying, ‘We want to live how we want to live,’ and other people saying, ‘But we want wild wolves.’ They get caught in their own storylines and so it becomes this social issue where two different groups of humans are caught. Meanwhile, there’s the wolves just being wolves and we almost always forget about that.”

From Dr. Haber’s research, Holleman believes that wolf plans should focus on the wolves’ family groups instead of the objective numbers, as they do not accurately portray the health of a wolf population.

The women of Oregon Wolf Education, a group of ranchers seeking to educate the public about the wolf problem in Enterprise, say that, as the population increases, wolves are becoming bolder and a possible danger to humans. A new Area of Known Wolf Activity is being designated by ODFW in eastern Oregon, meaning that evidence of a new pack of wolves has been found. Ranchers have found paw prints on their back porches, and stories of dogs and cattle acting anxious are everywhere. These anecdotes fuel the strife between the ranchers, who often feel they aren’t being heard, and conservationists, who feel that these unrecorded incidents aren’t enough evidence for action.

“We’re the small farmer that people talk about,” says Ramona Phillips of Oregon Wolf Education. Phillips, a transplant rancher and sister to Todd Nash, says that she and her husband have lost $15,000 in uncompensated property damage from the wolves over the years. An outspoken advocate for ranchers’ rights to defend their cattle, Phillips feels that ranchers have been mischaracterized as redneck Republicans, and as a result are left out of the conversation when it comes to legislation in the state capital, Salem.

“When I testified in Salem [about the Oregon Wolf Plan], my son was leaving for Afghanistan. I cried because he thinks that he’s defending our freedoms,” Phillips says. “Where is my freedom on my own private property to protect our cattle? I don’t understand this. I don’t understand the country I’m living in anymore. I don’t think this should be a partisan issue, but it turns out that it is.”

 

 

Nash has similar sentiments, seeing the rural and urban divide as a blockade of understanding. “They tend to think of us [ranchers] as callous and unfeeling,” he says. “It isn’t a matter of hunting [wolves] or killing them, it’s just a matter of protecting what we value. We make decisions here every day based on economics, morals, and good animal husbandry. A wolf dragging down your cattle and you not doing anything about it breaches all three.”

As with many endangered species, the possibility of a stable wolf population provokes strong emotions and invokes deeply embedded cultural ties of wolves in sheep’s clothing and the big bad wolf. At the same time, wolves represent wildness and the return of something long absent from Oregon. To some, it is a second chance to do things right and give rightful space to an animal that is not easily controlled.

“And you know?” says Klavins, sitting in his Portland office. “Wolves could care less. Wolves are just out there trying to survive, and they’ve been thrown into this.”