Western ranchers say their livelihood is at stake after wolves were reintroduced into the Lower 48 30 years ago
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth installment of Howl, a five-part written series and podcast season produced in partnership between the Idaho Capital Sun, States Newsroom and Boise State Public Radio.
Idaho rancher Jay Smith has a wolf problem.
Over the last 20 years, Smith said wolves have killed more than 200 of his cattle and caused major financial harm to his family’s business.
“At today’s value at nearly $2,000 a head, times that by 200 and see if we could have invested that money over time what would that have been?” Smith said. “Significant.”
Smith and his wife, Chyenne, raise Black Angus cattle near the town of Carmen, a tiny community near the Continental Divide, just west of the Montana border.
Jay grew up nearby; his family has been ranching in the area since 1924.
Last year, the family celebrated its centennial on the land.
But their history goes back even longer.
Smith has a family history book documenting cattle ownership back to the 1600s.
“So my family’s cattle raising lineage goes way back,” Smith said.
There’s something else that goes way back in Smith’s family: Warnings about wolves that have been passed down through the generations.
Idaho rancher ‘got to be a cowboy every day’ of his life
The J Lazy S Angus Ranch is situated in a green valley set in the shadows of high mountain peaks, some of which rise above 10,000 feet.
Wildfire smoke often hangs in the air during the summer. And on the other side of the valley, the Salmon River cuts through the landscape.
The ranch features a classic red barn, a horse corral, an assortment of farm machinery and a renovated old cabin surrounded by shade trees.
They have a small herd of Morgan-Quarter Horse crossbreeds and an array of cattle dogs that go everywhere with the Smiths, including high up in the surrounding mountains.
“One of the main reasons Chyenne and I bought this place is A, because ranching is in my blood,” Smith said. “But B, it’s exactly how we wanted to raise our children. I wanted them to have the work ethic and the animal husbandry background that I grew up with. I think it’s very important.”
Running cattle and working the ranch is all he’s ever known, and Smith wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“I don’t know if you ever watch TV, but I got to be a cowboy every day of my life, so I don’t know how you go wrong there,” Smith said. “(There is) a lot of freedom. These ranches are big, and so we had a lot of private property where us kids could go a long ways without getting in trouble or being in the wrong spot. And I don’t know how a city kid could ever get their head around that, but we could literally go for miles and not be somewhere we shouldn’t be.”
Ranching and living in wolf ground zero
The Smiths’ several hundred cattle have a lot of room to roam, too.
During summers, the cows live in the high country. They spend 12 to 16 weeks each in a cow camp way up in the mountains, roaming far and wide on public land.
And that’s where they run into trouble with wolves.
Only a few ridgelines separate Smith’s ranch from wolf ground zero: one of the original sites of reintroduction 30 years ago – Corn Creek in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
From their porch on the ranch, Jay and Chyenne Smith can see the Diamond Moose Grazing allotment, where wolves have a track record killing and harassing livestock, Smith said.
“It’s been one of the most consistently conflicted allotments throughout the years,” Smith said.
Jay Smith was 22 years old in 1995 when the government reintroduced wolves. He has seen ranching before wolves were reintroduced and the difference the animals made after they were reintroduced.
“We worked really hard to keep (reintroduction) from happening,” Smith said. “And then when it became inevitable and we could see the writing on the wall, then we started trying to position ourselves for how to live with the inevitable. It was coming. We’ve been here 100 years. We’re not leaving. So now how do we make this work?”
Idaho rancher affected by wolf depredation says compensation hard to come by
Not only do the wolves literally eat into their business, but every time the Smiths or other ranchers speak out or try to do something about it, they say they are vilified.
“The negativity and the hate towards ranchers is worse than the wolves, in my opinion, and it’s because the public’s been fed this fairy tale of what wolves are,” Chyenne Smith said. “And we’re the bad guys in every one of those stories.”
Jay Smith said he hasn’t seen a nickel in compensation for the livestock wolves killed.
“We have been paid for zero head ever,” he said.
Although Smith said he hasn’t been paid for any of his livestock losses, other Idaho ranchers have.
The state of Idaho has a compensation program to reimburse livestock owners the fair market value of animals that are killed by wolves or grizzly bears.
It applies to cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chicken, llamas and even bees – basically any animal used for food or in food production.
From 2014 to 2022, the state of Idaho’s livestock compensation program paid out $687,029.50 to 299 different livestock producers for compensation for verified livestock losses, state records show.
But to be paid, livestock owners must have a confirmed wolf kill claim filed with the Office of Species Conservation each year.
“In the topography we run in, we can’t find them in time,” Smith said. “They just simply don’t come home. We’ll find a pile of bones. We’ll find wolf scat right on top of those bones. I mean, we know what happened to them. But as far as Wildlife Services coming in and being able to make a confirmation report to send to the Office of Species Conservation to put us in the reimbursement program, we are zero for 200. That’s our batting average.”
State records show that most investigations of wolf complaints don’t conclude that wolves were definitely responsible.
From July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, Idaho Wildlife Services investigated 99 complaints of livestock losses blamed on wolves, state records show. About 28% of those investigations ruled wolves’ responsibility for livestock deaths were “confirmed” or “probable.”
But more than two-thirds of the wolf complaints, about 68%, were classified as “possible/unknown.” In some cases, wolves may have eaten the carcass of livestock after the animal was already dead but did kill the animal.
Smith said his losses add up.
“We have lost over 200 head of livestock in that 20-plus years to wolves,” Jay Smith said.
“One year we’ll lose 20 head of cattle, and one year we’ll lose zero,” he added. “And we just never quite know how to explain or how to do better, or how to mitigate that risk. It’s very variable, and it’s very unknown. But it’s remained over the years. It hasn’t gone away. It sounds like it’s come and gone, but the wolves are still back there.”
And even if wolves don’t kill livestock like cows and sheep, even the presence of wolves can distress animals enough that they aren’t as healthy and wouldn’t be worth as much at market.
But wolf supporters say the number of livestock killed is extremely low. In Idaho, Montana and Wyoming wolves are confirmed to have killed an average of less than 300 domestic animals per year – out of 6 million cows and sheep in those states.
But even if the overall numbers and percentages are low, the cost is high for the farming and ranching families like the Smiths.
With 30 years of experience since reintroduction and all the claims made by wolf advocates and all the meetings with the feds, nothing has changed Smith’s mind about wolves.
He opposed reintroducing wolves, and now that they are here, Smith thinks there are too many of them. As a result, he thinks ranchers should be given broad authority to kill wolves to protect their livestock.
And as the chairman of his local county’s Republican Party central committee, Smith has helped make that happen. He said he co-wrote a 2021 state law that helped make it easier to kill more wolves by expanding when and how they can be hunted and trapped.
The law allows hunters to purchase an unlimited number of wolf tags to kill wolves and makes trapping on private land legal year round.
“There’s still people vehemently against every proposal we have,” Smith said. “And I don’t know why. We’re not out to kill them all. We’re just out to make a living and keep our livelihoods.”
Chyenne Smith agreed.
“It’s about not being able to do everything we can to protect what’s ours when we need to,” she said.
The role trapping plays in the wolf v. livestock debate
When there are problems with wolves harassing or killing livestock, ranchers often call on trappers to catch the predators.
And one of the best people at trapping wolves is Rusty Kramer.
He’s the president of the Idaho Trappers Association and the incoming president of the National Trappers Association.
Whether it’s badgers, beavers, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, muskrats or wolves, if it’s legal to trap in Idaho, Kramer has probably caught it.
Depending on the animals, he’s used scent lures, bait or even blind set traps, hoping to entice an animal to step on a silver dollar-sized pan, which triggers the trap’s jaws to lose around the wolf’s foot and seize hold.
Once a wolf is trapped, Kramer shoots it behind the shoulder with his .22 magnum pistol, killing it. Since wolves were reintroduced, he’s trapped and killed 25 to 30.
Kramer was born and raised in Fairfield, Idaho, near the Sawtooth National Forest in central Idaho.
“I just learned how to trap looking over my dad’s shoulder and riding around with him and just kind of fell in love with it as a kid and I’ve been doing it ever since,” Kramer said.
It started as damage control, trapping ground squirrels and marmots, also known as rock chucks, to protect the alfalfa. Later, he moved on to coyotes and muskrats.
Kramer’s father taught him how to process and sell the pelts, stressing the importance of using every part of the animal. As a kid, the pelts put a little extra money in his pocket.
For him, trapping is a way of life and a family tradition.
Today, Kramer said the Idaho Trappers Association runs the largest fur sale in the United States, in Glenns Ferry, where a trapper can make good money for a wolf pelt.
A quality wolf pelt can go for $500 or more.
For 10 years as an adult, Kramer lived in Boise – the state’s largest city – about a 90-minute drive from Fairfield. After Micron Technology laid him off, Kramer returned to Fairfield.
But it’s tough to make a living on trapping alone, and Kramer also runs an alfalfa farm and is the watermaster for his local water district.
It’s the farm where Kramer and other farmers run into trouble with wolves. Ever since wolves came back, Kramer says, a lot more elk are hanging out in the valley where he and many other farmers grow alfalfa. He says the elk hang out there to keep safe from wolves, who tend to avoid agricultural areas because of the human presence. The elk trample the fields and eat the alfalfa, creating a headache and a cost for Rusty.
“I don’t hate wolves,” Kramer said. “I very (much) admire wolves. How far they can roam and how cunning they are and survive out there.”
But he thinks it was a mistake to reintroduce wolves to Idaho.
“I’m under the opinion it would be cool to snap your fingers and it’s back to ‘Dances with Wolves’ days,” Kramer said, referring to the 1990 movie starring Kevin Costner. “You know, where it’s buffalo from Ohio to Oregon and grizzlies and wolves. But there’s only so many places that grizzlies, wolves and buffalo can have in the 21st century, because they just roam so far. These aren’t foxes and coyotes that can live around humans.”
“There’s just not enough space for them in the 21st century, in my opinion,” Kramer said.
Does Idaho’s Wood River Wolf Project offer a solution to protecting livestock from wolves?
Suzanne Asha Stone is trying to to demonstrate that ranchers can live side-by-side with wolves today.
Thirty years ago, Stone was an intern working on the wolf reintroduction project. Since then, she’s become a prominent wolf expert and advocate.
She is the executive director of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network and a co-founder of the Wood River Wolf Project in Idaho.
Lately, Stone has been focusing on helping ranchers protect sheep and cattle without killing wolves.
Stone said the catalyst for the work was a “train wreck” of conflict between wolves and sheep in 2007 in central Idaho’s Blaine County.
Unaware that wolves were denning with pups in the area, a rancher let out his flock of sheep with some livestock guardian dogs for protection, Stone said.
“So to wolves, having those dogs come in meant that they had strange wolves coming in and were a significant threat to their pups,” Stone said. “The rancher, of course, didn’t know this. He had no idea that the wolves were there. But within 24 hours, we had dead sheep, dead livestock guardian dogs and a (wolf) pack with a death warrant on their head.”
Stone said the community came together after the event to look for a way to project sheep and wolves.
“It was at that time that the residents of Blaine County pushed back hard and said, ‘We really enjoy having wolves here. We had our own little Yellowstone happening right in our backyard, where we could go out and watch these wolves and their pups, and we want to keep them alive,’” Stone said.
From there, Stone sat down at the table with ranchers in the area, as well as an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services.
Stone said just about everyone was skeptical, even wolf biologists who wanted to keep more wolves alive.
“And so we sat down with all of them and then reached out to the ranchers and just said, ‘Let us try these nonlethal tools. Now everybody’s telling us we’re going to fail, but let’s try and see what happens,’” Stone said.
Stone started using something called fladry.
It’s nothing more than a barrier of waving flags, but it has proven successful to deter wolves in Eastern Europe and help sell high-mileage Hondas stateside.
“It looks like the flagging that sits around used car lots, basically,” Stone said. “It doesn’t look intimidating to us at all. Wolves don’t like it. They don’t trust it. And so we were able to keep the sheep behind those fladry pens for the rest of the season without having a single other loss. And the wolves were right there raising their pups for a good part of that summer. No more incidents at all.”
Stone’s critics called it beginner’s luck and questioned whether she could replicate her results over long periods of time or large areas.
That led to the creation of the Wood River Wolf Project, which for the last 17 summers has been partnering with ranchers in the area to use non-lethal tools and techniques to protect sheep from wolves.
The project area covers about 4,600 square miles of rugged, mountainous terrain.
Stone says there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to wolf conflicts – different terrain, different predator behavior, even varying access to electricity can affect what works. So, she’ll try just about anything – and her group has over the years. They’ve used solar-powered strobe lights, blasted air horns, played recordings of helicopters, even had cowboys play music.
In one case, wolves were feasting on llamas at an eastern Oregon ranch. So Stone’s team set up those 20-foot air dancers you see at car lots and lit them up at night.
“So when the wolves came over the top of the hill, they saw this enormous monster up there flapping around and making all kinds of noise, and oh my gosh, they were in the next county the next day,” she said.
“We’ve only lost two wolves in the 17 years now of the project and an average of less than five sheep a year for that entire 17-year period,” Stone said. “So it’s the lowest loss of livestock to wolves in any area where wolves and livestock overlap in the Western United States, probably beyond that. It’s a very successful project, and we use less money than what they do to kill wolves outside of the project area, where they’re losing more livestock there.”
But Stone hasn’t convinced everyone. In fact, one key holdout is her own state government.
Even when nonlethal methods of wolf control are available, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s written policy preference is to kill wolves to reduce the overall wolf population in the state.
“A lot of what we’ve learned here is being applied in countries all over the world, just not in the state of Idaho, and not to any real extent beyond our project area, because the state is so determined to kill wolves rather than to live with them,” Stone said.
Coming next week in Howl: Part 5, Ghost Wolves
Some experts say states are cooking the books on wolf numbers and that the anti-wolf forces are winning. Idaho Department of Fish and Game wolf counting methods have come under scrutiny by outside researchers, and some of the original people who helped bring wolves back 30 are worried the work they do could be undone.