Two gray wolves in Washington state were killed from a state helicopter Tuesday afternoon after officials decided the entire pack -- believed to be at least eight wolves -- needed to be killed because of repeated attacks on cattle, officials said.



An airborne marksman with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife killed the two wolves about seven miles from the Canadian border -- a week after marksmen and wildlife biologists spent days looking for the pack.

A major conservation group working with Washington state to manage its gray wolves agreed that the pack should be culled but also blamed a rancher in the area for not doing more to protect his cattle.




Gray wolves are listed as endangered under state law because they were nearly wiped out a century ago by settlers.

In the last decade, however, gray wolves have started to re-establish themselves in Washington due to recovery efforts in nearby states and dispersal from Canada.


At least eight packs are now established in the eastern half of Washington, which also has a conservation plan in place — one that aims to restore wolves in the wild without those same wolves preying on livestock. The state compensates ranchers who lose livestock to wolves, but that hasn't ended the tension.

"Wolves are recolonizing our state relatively quickly," Dave Ware, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman, told NBC News. "Managing conflicts is one of the most important objectives for recovery so that people don’t take things into their own hands."

Officials last July killed one pack member to see if that would have an impact. The decision to kill the entire pack came after the pack's attacks on cattle continued. Since July, wolves are believed to have killed or injured at least 17 calves and cows despite non-lethal measures to deter them, according to the state wildlife office.

Conservation Northwest, a group working with the state, agreed that killing the pack was best for long-term recovery of gray wolves in the wild.

But director Mitch Friedman told NBC station KING 5 that rancher Bill McIrvine, who lost part of his herd to the pack, "has total responsibility for the problem" for not being as cooperative as other ranchers with programs aimed at keeping cattle and wolves apart.

The wildlife department, for its part, "has not been as firm as it needed to be," Friedman added, especially since McIrvine's cattle graze on public land.

McIrvine, for his part, earlier told KING 5 that he believes groups with "a radical environmental agenda" are conspiring to introduce gray wolves in order "to take our (grazing) lease from us."



Yes, at this point it's the only way to build a sustainable gray wolf population in Washington state.No, ranchers should be required to take more steps to protect their livestock.

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"We have the right to protect our property," McIrvine said, adding that he considered the wildlife department "a rogue government agency" that was essentially saying "we got to sit back and do nothing while the wolves kill our livestock."

Ware said efforts to get rancher cooperation for "non-lethal methods of preventing conflicts" have improved in recent weeks. Several agreements with ranchers should be in place for next year that will hopefully "avoid a repeat of the Wedge Pack situation," he said.

One obvious question is why not just move the wolves to a wilderness area away from livestock?

"Experience from other states with recently recovered wolf populations indicates that survival of relocated wolves is not very high, especially if there are other wolf packs in the area where they are moved, which appears to be the case in most of northeast Washington," Ware said.




On top of that, "once a pack becomes habituated to eating livestock, moving them only moves the conflict" since wolf territories are larger than any wilderness area the state could ship them to, he said.

"Lethal removal is being conducted in every" state with gray wolves, Ware added, while acknowledging that since wolf recovery efforts are new in Washington "the concept of killing an endangered species to promote recovery is difficult to understand or accept."

"As wolf recovery has progressed across the West, lethal removal has been an important part of that recovery and it has obviously not impacted wolf numbers or expansion of their range," Ware said. "We don’t expect it to be an impediment in Washington’s wolf recovery either."

"The Wedge area is good habitat, so wolves will likely recolonize relatively quickly over the next year or two," Ware said.

A department wildlife veterinarian will perform necropsies on the wolves later this week. Their hides and skulls will be used for educational purposes, according to a statement on the state's wildlife management website.

I guess washinton state may have different rules, even concerning Federal Lands located within the state. From what I have seen in Colorado if memory serves me, was that folks running stock on Federal grazing leases were pretty limited in what they could do. Seems like they could build temporary fences, but the stock had to be moved and the fences had to be taken down prior to the start of hunting seasons. I do recall having to ease my way thru herds of both cattle and sheep being pulled off the forest when going up to hunt first rifle season.

I grew up in eastern Washington.
A lot of the public lands, had a legal designation of "Range Land" What I remember that meant practically, was that ranchers could run cattle on those grounds. The ranchers had some legal protection from things like car collisions.
Typically, ranchers would move herds of animals from lower elevations in the spring, and gather them up again in the fall.

Does Colorado have a similar "Range Land" laws?

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Does Colorado have a similar "Range Land" laws?

Not sure on that. I just remember that the week or 2 weeks before first rifle elk season would open, the ranchers started moving their cattle and sheep off of the National forest and BLM Lands and roll up any wire they had put up during the grazing season. It would get aggrivating to have to drive thru several bunches of a couple of hundred sheep/cattle on a 10 to 15 mile stretch of narrow mountain roads.

I guess what I am gettinmg at and not wording it properly is I don't really see what a rancher could really do on Public Land to really protect his livestock from wolves or other predators, 24/7 during the grazing period.

No legal need for fence in Washington under Range Land laws.

No way to protect the cattle, short of shooting predators. Kind of why they got rid of them(wolves) in the first place.

The ranchers have to sit back and play by the State's rules, if wolves are damaging property, they must follow the approved procedures and they get paid(I am sure it is a pain in the ass process, and takes more time then grabbing a rifle and driving a wolf pack to the next drainage). Has to be a hard pill to swallow for the ranchers.