Rancher Dan Greenwood stood among his cows in a wide green meadow under a vibrant blue sky about an hour north of Lake Tahoe, studying the idyllic landscape and calling it what he thinks he is feeling: the trap of death.
Behind him was a three-month-old calf stricken by a wolf the night before laying in the grass, with deep wounds on its side. Two of those legs were so badly injured that I was able to barely support my calf weight when I tried to endure it. The animal’s upset mother walked a few feet away.
Greenwood wrapped his hands around one of his calf ankles and gently rolled them onto his back to inspect the savage bite wound.
He was about to decide whether to give his calves another day to see if he could recover enough to catch up with his mother.
“If I can just walk and grab him, the wolves can do that,” Greenwood said with a painful expression on his face. “That’s not a challenge for them at all.”
The challenge of the sturdy spread of the Sierra Valley is that cattle are now catching up to all the calls coming from the ranchers attacked by wolves. There have been 30 confirmed wolves attacks from March, over the valley that spans the Sierra and Plumas counties.
Surprised residents watch incredibly, not including deer attacked on plots just outside the small town, or giant, enthusiastic elk that was chased by the front door in the middle of April and massacred by two wolves. The terrifying 21-year-old stood on the other side of the front door, clutching her pistol, wondering if someone was about to break in.
“Ruckus” died enough for him to open the door and peer outside, Connor Kilmurray said, “I saw blood everywhere, it was painted on the walls and on the doors… it was definitely a massacre.”
When Fisher arrived for investigation, he was relieved that a hopeless elk weighing hundreds of pounds hadn’t crashed straight into the living room with two nargs on its heels.
“If it was just two feet above it would have been pretty awake,” Fisher said.
For ranchers, the solution to the growing problem in rural California’s northern counties seems obvious. They want to shoot wolves preying on cows.
However, wolve populations are large enough to be permitted in most of the American West in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, but are still listed as California’s endangered species. Killing a wolf here is a crime that will be fined up to $100,000 and punished in prison for up to a year.
Whether or not Sierra Valley ranchers face such consequences is another matter. The wolf attack feels very out of control, the Sierra County King said. Atty. Sandra Groven says she will not pursue accusations against ranchers who kill wolves preying on cows.
Groven warned that she had not given poachers to engage in “outrageous conduct” or to issue licenses to anyone to “continue to killing.” However, given the frequency of wolves’ attacks in the valley recently, she said she doesn’t understand how to bring charges against one of her neighbors in order to protect herself or their property.
“The bottom line, I won’t prosecute,” Groven said. “What should they do? Run up, wave their arms and say ‘Walking’? ”
The struggle between the rancher and the wolf is as old as grazing itself, and no one interviewed for this article wanted to repeat the sins of the past. By the early 20th century, American wolves were almost extinct. When then-President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Species Act in 1973 and wolves were added to the list of protected animals, only small packs remained in northern Minnesota.
With the numbers still low 20 years from now, government biologists have reintroduced wolves from Canada to Central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. Since then they have thrived through the West and moved slowly.
The first wild wolf monitored by scientists via electronic collars that crossed from Oregon to California in 2011. Today, Golden State has seven established packs, with an estimated population of around 70 wild wolves.
Excited by the wolf’s comeback prospects, state wildlife biologists and other guardians have assumed that predators target natural prey, mostly deer and elk. However, decades of logging and climate change have significantly altered forests and topography in most Northern California, resulting in a lack of deer and elk. Instead, many of the wolves hunted shiny, domesticated, domesticated cows on wide open meadows, and domesticated cows.
When that happens, the rancher is like someone comes to your store and steals from the shelf. No one pretends to be a pet – they are raised and raised to be massacred. However, without some way to protect your products, your business will not survive for a long time.
To protect livestock, fish and wildlife states promote non-lethal “haze” of predators, which allow them to launch guns into the air and drive trucks and ATVs towards wolves to try and harass them with noise from drones. However, according to local ranchers, it hasn’t been that way for at least long and it doesn’t seem to work.
And that led to a nearby rebellion in Northeastern California counties, including the Sierra. There, local governments have declared a state of emergency and begged state officials for permission to “remove” problem wolves more aggressively.
The reason Hayes doesn’t seem to work out is because the wolves don’t seem to be afraid of humans, according to the ranchers. And it appears that cows who have gone for generations without dealing with these apex predators have forgotten how to protect themselves by sticking to their herds.
The reason why this rustic and submissive cow was loosened in the vast pastures is that Cameron Krebs, a fifth-generation rancher in eastern Oregon, has been dealing with aggressive wolves for many years. “I might get hurt, I might come across the wrong person, I might run away to the car just because I don’t feel like I’m going to see both ways,” he said with a laugh.
Krebs has become a kind of environmental hero because of his commitment to finding alongside the wolves. It is summarised in ensuring that the animals in his pack stick together.
But it takes a lot of time and talent, and there are inevitably wolves who will win even the most intentional effort. “At that point you need to be able to shoot them,” Krebs said. “It’s just one of the tools in the toolbox.”
Back in Sierra Valley, Greenwood said in 2018 he saw his first wolf through the window in his living room. “It was just until I,” Greenwood said incredibly.
But things didn’t get too bad until 2022, when he lost nearly 20 animals to an increasingly brave wolf. Since then, he said, he’s exhausted and fighting.
“I was shipping cows here in May, so I feel really bad,” Greenwood said. “It’s beautiful here. There’s a lot of grass growing. Everything is right for them except that the wolves circling in the hills are waiting for them to arrive here.”
He is skilled in the non-lethal technology that has been promoted by environmental advocates and embraced by the Fish and Wildlife Service, but his shoulders have settled down and his eyes have explained how unrealistic they seem to him now.
“The profit margins are very, very thin,” he said. Some people said they seem to think that all ranchers are as rich as Kevin Costner’s character in “Yellowstone.” But his reality is not like television.
“It’s me and another guy running 1,200 acres of irrigated hay and 600 cows,” Greenwood said. “If six guys on the horse helped me, I could have put all of these cows in the evening,” but I don’t have the money for that.
“We feel like our hands are tied up. We’re exhausted. There’s zero help,” Greenwood said.
In 2021, the state established a $3 million pilot project to refund wolves’ lost cow ranchers and assisted in paying non-lethal deterrents such as electric fences and flags tied to lights stuck on fence posts.
But Greenwood said that by the time he finished filling out all the paperwork for the cows he lost in 2022, he had no state money. “I haven’t seen the dime yet,” he said.
Arthur Middleton, a professor of wildlife management who works with Berkeley, California, said he was surprised at how bold the wolves have become in the Sierra Valley.
In April, while a Sacramento TV news crew filmed an interview with the sheriff on a cow pasture, two gray wolves appeared in the background stalking livestock, Middleton said. Their views so close to the daytime road, where the noisy news crew is being filmed nearby, seemed to have not witnessed his long-standing efforts to recover the wolves.
“It just shows the incredible challenge that ranchers and wildlife managers have in their own hands,” Middleton said.
For many Sierra Valley residents, the question is whether the wolf in question will be forced to be removed, and who will do it. An upset rancher? Or environmental experts waking up to eliminate the most prolific cow killers while preserving the remaining packs?
There’s a joke that’s circulating in the valley this spring. She doesn’t think the ranchers continued about the implicit threat, but she said it would be difficult to blame them if they were.
Sheriff Fisher said he wanted him to shoot the power to shoot wolves he believes, like a pair chasing an elk on someone’s front porch. However, he believes that the Fish and Wildlife Department should be responsible for “removing” wolves that routinely attack cattle.
Greenwood said he did not insist on eliminating wolves. He can only protect his livestock.
He saw a wolf moving among his cows the night a 3 month old calf was attacked and another was killed. Following the law, he removed his hand from the gun, rotated the ATV, chasing predators more than a mile away, hoping that it was enough to keep the cows safe.
That wasn’t the case. “They are very patient,” Greenwood said. “They’ve lasted you long.”
A 3 month old calf? It died of wounds before the wolves returned.
