Ranches with Wolves: How straight talk is the salvation of open range in the Northern Rockies

Since U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995 and 1996, conflicts between wolves and livestock have increased as the wolf population has grown and expanded. Ranchers in wolf country face a changing ecology that now includes wolves as a keystone predator, and failing to adapt to the change has meant hard losses for some ranchers. In other cases, ranchers have found ways to compensate for the reintroduced predator. These ranching situations, both the unchanged and the changed, offer lessons to livestock producers who can anticipate wolves becoming part of the landscape. And the values most likely to make the transition from ranching without a viable wolf population to ranching with a viable population as painless as possible, the ranchers say, are communication and cooperation between themselves, their neighbors, wildlife managers and government trappers.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Montana

Year

2010

Author dc:creator

• Grant, James Wilson

• wolf depredations
• wolves and livestock
• wolf depredations in the Northern Rockies
• wolves

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/794

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.umt.edu:etd-1813