Two more wolves can be killed after a livestock attack, Oregon officials say
Wildlife officials approved the killings of two more wolves from an eastern Oregon pack on Monday after livestock owners experienced another attack.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife first approved a kill permit on July 29 to kill four uncollared wolves after the Lookout Mountain pack killed or injured five cows over two weeks.
Three days after the permit was issued, officials shot and killed two wolf pups from a helicopter. The permit expired Aug. 21. And livestock attacks halted for 18 days after the initial wolf killings.
Ranchers then took nonlethal measures to keep wolves from killing their animals, including hazing the wolves, increasing human presence, removing injured cattle and changing pastures.
Then another attack happened on Aug. 19, so the wildlife agency issued another permit lasting three weeks. It will expire Sept. 14.
“ODFW has a responsibility to address continued chronic livestock depredation by wolves and strives to first pursue incremental lethal control rather than removing entire packs to strike a balance between protecting livestock and wolves on the landscape,” the agency wrote in their wolves and livestock updates.
Permits are issued when wolves are a “significant risk to livestock.” Wildlife officials deemed the wolves a risk and “chronically depredating.”
“While killing pups is not something we want to be doing, our overall goals are to reduce the depredation while allowing the overall pack to endure by not targeting the collared breeding adults,” Michelle Dennehy, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, told McClatchy News Aug. 2.
The two pups shot at the beginning of August were both 3-and-a-half months old. The pack originally included seven pups and a collared male and female. Wildlife employees, however, only counted five pups and their parents during the flight, Dennehy said.
Now there are an estimated five uncollared wolf pups remaining in pack. Authorized ranchers can kill two of them.
This story was originally published August 24, 2021 at 5:02 PM with the headline "Two more wolves can be killed after a livestock attack, Oregon officials say."
