Wolves Murdered: The Lost Sierra is tragically a little less wild this weekend. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife this week shot and killed 4 members of the Beyem Seyo wolf pack in Sierra Valley, simply for following their instincts and preying on “free hamburgers” (AKA cows and calves) left out in the valley unattended.
According to the CDFW website, ranchers and CDFW officials spent “18,000 hours” trying wolf deterrent methods, but apparently failed to implement what is widely known as the most effective wolf deterrent, the presence of Pyrenees dogs and llamas to guard the herd, combined with the old cowboy technique of “riding the range.” If ranchers claim that the herds are too big to defend, then these industrial sized herds are clearly too big-period. If wolves cannot survive even in one of California’s most wild areas, what chance do they have in the state?
Death without reason is murder and state officials and local ranchers have blood on their hands. These (endangered) wolves who included one of only a handful of breeding pairs in the whole state, were murdered unnecessarily by state officials, who failed initially to prevent habituation of the wolves to easy meals, when they knew wolves were in the area. The killings are even more unnecessary, as the cows in Sierra Valley are about to be transported to the central valley for overwintering, and they would not be a food source for much longer this season anyway.
Instead of working with the entire community to come up with a solution, the CDFW have basically become a “strike team” obediently serving Big Ag and destroying even the most sensitive and endangered species in our state. Shame on them.
According to one source, the wolves were shot from a helicopter with tranquilizer darts and then given lethal injections– simply for behaving like wolves. Another three wolves are being removed from their natural habitat and interned in a fenced preserve, according to the same source. The CDFW apparently is well on its way to removing the entire Beyem Seyo wolf pack from the landscape. These kind of unnecessary and damaging attacks on the wild are what our tax dollars are paying for.
If you live in wildfire country, you have an obligation to yourself, your family, your neighbors, and firefighters to harden your home against fire and maintain defensible space. If you are a rancher who operates in wild areas, you have an obligation to defend your herd against predators of all types, even if it means more work, and to accept that running such operations in wild areas means some risk of loss.
It must be horrible and quite traumatic for the calf, the mother and the whole herd, we are not cheering the wolf kills by any means. They should be eating deer in the woods and other prey. The only way to prevent wolves killing cattle is having other animals guarding them. It’s clear that fladry etc is not sufficient. It also must be quite traumatic for ranchers to witness, especially if one is attached to the herd. We don’t mean to minimize that, but it is nature, predators are a part of it…we can’t just erase them from the landscape. It is one more reason to adopt best practices for coexistence.
This culture has a tendency– when confronted by natural risks– to lash out against the wild rather than take responsibility for our own role in the problem. Killing wolves and cutting down forests won’t prevent predators or wildfires, it will only make these things more potent. These dysfunctional actions have their roots in manifest destiny and the associated widespread slaughter of Native American men, women, children, and elders only a few generations ago.
The solution is not to continue killing an endangered species struggling to make a recovery, the solution is to remove the unnatural feature on the landscape (easy hamburger meals undefended by dogs, humans or llamas).
BIG AG out of Sierra Valley NOW! RE-WILD THE SIERRA NEVADA!
Large scale ranching of cows in the Sierra Valley:
– endangers the recovery of keystone predator populations
– is a large and growing source of methane and other carbon emissions
– when done on former wetland areas, ranchers use heavy equipment to dig channels and disrupt the flow of water through the land, drying out meadows and losing crucial habitat as well as large quantities of carbon storage.
– pollutes waterways, specifically the headwaters of the Feather River serving the water needs of 26 million Californians!
The CDFW website states:
“The impacted wolves included a breeding pair (WHA08M and LAS23F), female (BEY01F) and male (BEY12M). During the course of the operation, a juvenile wolf (BEY12M) was mistaken for the breeding male (WHA08M), which was of similar color and size, and was unintentionally lethally removed. Remains of two additional juveniles in this pack (BEY15M and BEY17M) were found and they were determined to have died prior to the start of the operation. The cause of their deaths is unknown; however, juvenile gray wolf death due to natural causes is common.”
So, it sounds like the CDFW killed a juvenile wolf “unintentionally” and it also sounds like they are failing to adequately investigate the deaths of the other two juvenile wolves even though this might have been associated with an illegal killing by local ranchers. So much for the rule of law.
Lodge a complaint to your state senator and assemblymember and directly to CDFW- DEMAND they leave the remnants of the Beyem SEO pack ALONE and provide direct guidance on a guard dog/ llama program for local ranchers rather than resorting to murder: Jennifer.benedet@wildlife.ca.gov
