We are excited to announce that a paper documenting the first seven years of the Wood River Wolf Project was just published in the Journal of Mammalogy! It appears in a special edition of the Journal on the Lethal Control of Predators. See the article below.

Adaptive use of nonlethal strategies for minimizing wolf–sheep conflict in Idaho

Suzanne A. Stone; Stewart W. Breck; Jesse Timberlake; Peter M. Haswell; Fernando Najera; Brian S. Bean; Daniel J. Thornhill

J Mammal (2017) 98 (1): 33-44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyw188

Published: 02 February 2017

Abstract

Worldwide, native predators are killed to protect livestock, an action that can undermine wildlife conservation efforts and create conflicts among stakeholders. An ongoing example is occurring in the western United States, where wolves (Canis lupus) were eradicated by the 1930s but are again present in parts of their historic range. While livestock losses to wolves represent a small fraction of overall livestock mortality, the response to these depredations has resulted in widespread conflicts including significant efforts at lethal wolf control to reduce impacts on livestock producers, especially those with large-scale grazing operations on public lands. A variety of nonlethal methods have proven effective in reducing livestock losses to wolves in small-scale operations but in large-scale, open-range grazing operations, nonlethal management strategies are often presumed ineffective or infeasible. To demonstrate that nonlethal techniques can be effective at large scales, we report a 7-year case study where we strategically applied nonlethal predator deterrents and animal husbandry techniques on an adaptive basis (i.e., based on terrain, proximity to den or rendezvous sites, avoiding overexposure to techniques such as certain lights or sound devices that could result in wolves losing their fear of that device, etc.) to protect sheep (Ovis aries) and wolves on public grazing lands in Idaho. We collected data on sheep depredation mortalities in the protected demonstration study area and compared these data to an adjacent wolf-occupied area where sheep were grazed without the added nonlethal protection measures. Over the 7-year period, sheep depredation losses to wolves were 3.5 times higher in the Nonprotected Area (NPA) than in the Protected Area (PA). Furthermore, no wolves were lethally controlled within the PA and sheep depredation losses to wolves were just 0.02% of the total number of sheep present, the lowest loss rate among sheep-grazing areas in wolf range statewide, whereas wolves were lethally controlled in the NPA. Our demonstration project provides evidence that proactive use of a variety of nonlethal techniques applied conditionally can help reduce depredation on large open-range operations.

Canis lupus, coexistence, human–wildlife conflict, livestock damage prevention, predator

For the full article, follow this link: https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article/doi/10.1093/jmammal/gyw188/2977254/Adaptive-use-of-nonlethal-strategies-for