California wolves are on the comeback and eating cattle. Ranchers say, 'Enough!'
No matter how hard wildlife officials try to direct the wolves toward their natural prey, mostly deer and elk, they seem to find the bigger, slower, domesticated cows wandering through open fields a lot more appealing.
SISKIYOU COUNTY, Calif. — In far Northern California, beneath a towering mountain ridge still covered in April snow, one of the state’s last cowboys stood in the tall green grass of a pasture he tends describing what he sees as the one blight on this otherwise perfect landscape: wolves.“I hate ‘em,” said Joel Torres, 25, his easy smile fading as he explained what the apex predators do to the cattle in his care at Prather Ranch, an organic farm in Siskiyou County dedicated to raising beef in a natural, stress-free environment. “They’ve just been tearing into our baby calves, mostly our yearlings.”Unlike predators that go for the throat and kill prey relatively quickly, wolves often attack from behind and rip victims apart while they’re trying to flee. Once they bring a cow to the ground, the pack will “kind of pick around a little bit, eat the good stuff” — particularly the rectum and udders — “and then just leave them and go on to the next one,” Torres said.That’s how he has found dozens of mortally injured young cows, trembling and in shock, after wolf attacks. “It’s crazy, the endurance of these animals. They’ll just take it,” Torres said. There’s no saving them. Their intestines often spill out through their hindquarters, and Torres shoots the cows to put them out of their misery.He’d like to shoot the wolves, too, at least a few, to teach the pack that there are “consequences to coming around here and tearing into our cattle.” But the predators remain on the state’s endangered species list, and aggressive measures to control their behavior are strictly forbidden.Instead, all Torres can do is grit his teeth and deal with the grisly aftermath. VIDEO | 00:05 A wolf howling in Northern California A February video shows a wolf howling in Northern California. (Courtesy of Patrick Griffin) Torres and many other ranchers in California live where two very lofty and environmentally satisfying ideas collide: all natural, free-range ranching and the government-assisted return of a predator our ancestors hunted to near extinction.No matter how hard officials try to direct the wolves toward their natural prey, mostly deer and elk, they seem to find the bigger, slower, domesticated cows wandering through well-kept, wide-open fields a lot more appealing.Things have gotten so bad so quickly — wolves have been back in California for only a bit more than a decade — that officials in Modoc and Sierra counties have declared emergencies. Leaders in Siskiyou and Lassen counties are calling on the state to do something about the devastating economic toll the wolves are taking on ranchers. And while wolf attacks on people are almost unheard of, many in those counties are worried about potential risks to children and pets as the wild predators wander ever closer to houses and show signs of becoming accustomed to humans.In response, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has approved what it calls increased “hazing,” which includes firing guns toward the sky, driving trucks and ATVs toward wolves to shoo them away and harassing them with noise from drones — but nothing that might injure the wolves.Ranchers are skeptical. Other hazing methods approved by the department in recent years, such as electric fences with red flags attached that flutter in the wind, have done little to keep the wolves from their herds.“The wolves just jump over those fences,” Torres said. “They do no good.” Wolves are preying on cows at Jim and Mary Rickert’s Siskiyou County ranch. They want more options to deal with the predators than banging pots and hanging flags. Mary Rickert, who owns the Prather Ranch with her husband, Jim, said the obvious solution is to let ranchers shoot problem wolves. “We’d just pick off a few of the bad actors, so the others would go, whoa, and back off,” she said.A century ago, wolves in the United States were almost wiped out by ranchers who regarded them as lethal enemies. The last wolf legally shot in California was in 1924, and by 1930 they were gone from almost the entire country, except for a small pack in northern Minnesota.But in 1973, then-President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, and his administration added wolves to the list the following year. In the decades that followed, wolves began a slow recovery, mostly in the northern U.S.Then, in 2011, a wolf from Oregon known as OR7 — monitored by government biologists via an electronic collar — crossed the border into California and became the first known wild wolf to inhabit the state in almost 90 years. Like other notable transplants to the Golden State, he found pop culture stardom, becoming the heroic subject of a children’s book and a 2014 documentary.Environmental advocates and cheerleaders for biodiversity were overjoyed that the wolves — who in their best moments look a lot like big, cuddly dogs — were making such an astonishing comeback. The hope was that they’d mostly eat other wild animals. VIDEO | 00:08 Wolves feed on a cow in Northern California A video shows a wolf pack feeding on a dead cow in August. (Courtesy of Patrick Griffin) But ask any rancher living in wolf country, and they’ll tell you that’s not what happened — and recent science backs them up.In 2022-23, researchers from UC Davis analyzed more than 100 wolf scat samples collected in northeast California from the so-called Lassen pack. They found that 72% of the samples contained cattle DNA, and every wolf had at least one sample that contained cow, said Kenneth Tate, one of the researchers.What’s more, there were 13 wolves in the pack, nearly twice as many as state wildlife officials believed at the time.“These packs are not in the wilderness. They’re not up on Mt. Shasta or Lassen peak,” Tate said. “They’re establishing themselves down in the valleys, where the summer cattle graze.”And they are thriving. In just 14 years since OR7 crossed the border, seven separate packs have established themselves in the state. They’re mostly in the north, but one pack has been confirmed in the southern Sierra Nevada, 200 miles from Los Angeles.None of those packs has done as much damage to livestock as the “Whaleback” pack (named after a nearby mountain) that stalks the Prather Ranch in the remote Butte Valley. VIDEO | 00:09 A group of wolves in Northern California A January 2022 video of a group of wolves in Northern California. (Courtesy of Patrick Griffin) That’s because Prather’s lush pastures back up against a secluded mountain ridge running from nearby Mt. Shasta north to the Oregon border. That land belongs to the U.S. Forest Service, and it’s covered in mature pine trees that provide nearly perfect cover.From the top of the ridge, where the wolves are believed to make their den, there’s a commanding view of Prather Ranch to the east and of another ranch, Table Rock, to the west. At any given moment in summer, when thousands of free-ranging cattle are scattered across those pastures, the wolves can gaze down from their protected perch and take their pick.“It’s like they’re deciding between McDonald’s and Burger King,” said Patrick Griffin, the “wolf liaison” for Siskiyou County, whose job is to try to mitigate conflict between the predators and ranchers. “Wolves are beautiful animals, they’re just beautiful,” says Patrick Griffin, the wolf liaison in Siskiyou County. “But what they do? That isn’t so beautiful.” There’s a “good-sized” elk herd ranging just north of the ranches, Griffin said, and he keeps hoping that the department’s nonlethal hazing tactics will persuade the wolves to turn their attention to their natural prey. But he doesn’t think the odds are very good.“An elk is a lot more intimidating than a cow,” Griffin said. “Which would you pick?”The bigger problem, Griffin said, is that the Whaleback pack is teaching its young to hunt cows. And when they head off to claim their own territory and start their own packs, they’ll take those lessons with them.While other states, including Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, have allowed wolf hunts to resume, California still forbids ranchers from taking aggressive measures to stop the predators.In addition to the nonlethal hazing, the department encourages ranchers to hire “range riders,” essentially cowboys, to sleep in the pastures with the cows. But that costs money, and the state doesn’t help with the added expense, Griffin said.And even when people are present to harass the wolves, these ranches are so large that it’s impossible for them to be everywhere at once. One night, a “government guy” rode around Prather Ranch in his pickup with a spotlight, and the wolves still “tore into two cows that I had to put down,” Torres said.Each cow the wolves kill represents thousands of dollars in lost revenue, so in 2021 the state set up a pilot program with $3 million to reimburse ranchers. When they found a dead or dying cow with telltale signs of wolf “depredation,” ranchers could alert the state and a representative would come out to investigate. If the investigator concluded wolves were to blame, the rancher would get a check, about $5,000 on average.But that money ran out in a hurry, state records show, with the majority of it, 67%, going to ranchers whose wolves were killed by the Whaleback pack. Fladry — bright colorful flags hung from wire — are among the nonlethal methods the state recommends for warding off wolves. And while the fund covered confirmed wolf kills, it did not compensate for all of the animals — especially newborn calves that are easier to carry — that simply disappeared into the forest.Griffin, who investigates suspected wolf kills in the region for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, acknowledged that the 80 or so kills attributed to the Whaleback pack is an undercount. He cited studies from other states that estimate only about 1 in 8 wolf kills are ever confirmed.“I know we don’t find most of them,” Griffin said.And there’s no money to compensate for the damage that the mere presence of wolves does to cow herds. The cows lose a lot of weight from stress and from trying to stay away from the wolves. Tate, the UC Davis researcher, said GPS data from trackers attached to cows show some of them being chased around the pastures all night long. “Cows don’t usually run 10 miles over four hours in the middle of the night,” Tate said. “That’s just not what they do.”But wolves are persistence hunters. Weighing about 100 pounds each, they might struggle to take down a yearling cow that’s pushing 1,000 pounds. So they spook the cow and get it running, following behind at a comfortable trot until the cow is exhausted. Then they attack.“It’s fun for [the wolves]; it’s like an adrenaline rush,” said Torres. “You can tell it really excites them.”But it’s a nightmare for the herd, and not just the cows that get singled out. Researchers have found elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in herds exposed to wolves. Not only do the cows lose weight, but they abort pregnancies at increased rates, researchers found. More than 40 cows have been killed on this ranch, hunted down by wolves who scout their prey from lookouts on Goosenest Mountain. “Cattle actually react to wolves very differently, and in a much more extreme way, than they react to other predators,” Rickert said.“We have bears around the ranch, and they’ll go and swim in the water troughs, and the cattle will just watch,” she said with a laugh. And the occasional mountain lion will stop by, maybe kill a calf, and then move on.But the wolves set up shop and torment the cattle.The UC Davis researchers estimated that, over the course of one summer, each wolf in their study cost ranchers between $70,000 and $163,000. All of which has left Griffin, the Siskiyou County wolf liaison, with deeply mixed feelings about the return of the predators.“There are a lot of people in California who love wolves,” he said, “but not very many of them live close to wolves.”Griffin said he enjoys tracking the predators, climbing ridges to see how they use the landscape to their advantage, setting up cameras in the mountains to catch breathtaking images of them playing with their young or howling in the snow on a moonlit night.But on a recent afternoon, walking through a pasture in the shadow of Mt. Shasta with puffy white clouds drifting across a cobalt blue sky, Griffin recalled one of his worst days on the job.He’d seen buzzards on the hillside just ahead, where the terrain turns steeply upward and the forest begins. When he arrived to see what the birds were eating, he found a dead cow, its rectum and udders torn away — classic wolf kill. Mixed with all the blood, he noticed a substantial amount of mucus. His heart sank as he followed the trail of bodily fluids about 60 yards downhill to the half-eaten remains of a newborn calf.He figured the wolves had waited until the cow was in labor, straining so hard with the contractions that she couldn’t run, at least not very far.“Wolves are beautiful animals, they’re just beautiful,” Griffin said, gazing up at the ridge where the predators parade in front of his cameras, sometimes with fresh kill in their mouths. “But what they do? That isn’t so beautiful.”
