County commits $20,000 for predator control

Curt Jacobs of Keating testified in front of the county commissioners on Wednesday morning giving them an update on the sheep he has lost to wolves this year. Jacobs is holding the Idaho Stockman Farmers magazine which tells the story of wolf depredation in Idaho.(Baker City herald/Kathy Orr)

Jacobs told commissioners he was requesting money from the county to help pay for the effort, which continued today, in which federal workers are trying to find and kill the pair of rogue wolves that have killed more than 30 animals in Baker County since spring, including sheep, calves and a goat, and are suspected of injuring several horses as well.

However, in the long run, Jacobs said he believes predator control costs should be borne by federal and state agencies responsible for reintroducing wolves to the West.

He said the federal government created wolf depredation problems by allowing transplanted Canadian wolves into Idaho in the 1990s, and the courts and state officials in Oregon are responsible for allowing the wolves to migrate here from Idaho.

Commission Chairman Fred Warner Jr. said that because he believes wolves will continue to prey on livestock, he supports spending $20,000 to match Union County’s commitment for the federal position.

However, Warner said the combined $40,000 would not be enough to fund a full-time predator control position, and that he would like to see Congress and the Oregon Legislature take responsibility for wolf predation in Northeastern Oregon and pony up money to deal with the problem.

He said this would be a good issue to talk about with Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., at his town hall meeting Friday morning at the National Guard Armory in Baker City.

Warner also encourages ranchers to contact state legislators and ask about securing money for predator control from the Legislative Emergency Board or from the Legislature itself, which might have a special session in February.

Warner said Wednesday that he wants to make sure that the county’s $20,000 contribution, and any future funding the commission allocates to predator control, is well spent.

“Those problem wolves may go away,” Warner said. “If Baker County is footing the bill, we want to make sure (the predator control agent hired) is working all the time, so the county is getting its money’s worth.”

Jacobs said besides the wolf problems, he’s also seeing more and more cases of bear and cougars killing sheep and calves on rangelands in the Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla national forests. 

In narrating a computer slide show with pictures of dead sheep and a dead goat killed in the latest wolf attack at his ranch Aug. 27 and Aug. 28, Jacobs said the wolves bit the sheep in the neck and back, and peeled back their wooly hides and bit the chest area, but didn’t eat the carcasses.

“This is a photo of a lamb with a broke back. His mother was hurt so bad she’d fall to her knees when she tried to move,” Jacobs said.

He said the device installed this spring, which blares a siren designed to scare away the radio-collared wolf if it comes within a quarter-mile, was removed before the wolves returned last week.

Jacobs said he hasn’t been contacted by Defenders of Wildlife with an offer to pay for the four sheep and one goat killed last week. The organization, which supports the return of wolves to Oregon, did reimburse him $3,150 for 19 lambs that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the USDA Wildlife Management Services confirmed were killed by wolves on his ranch in April.

“I guess I have to contact that organization myself this time,” Jacobs said.

Last week the ODFW issued kill permits for the two wolves, a male and a female, involved in livestock attacks at the Jacobs and Moore ranches, but Jacobs and others at Wednesday’s meeting asked Bruce Eddy, from the ODFW office in La Grande, why it took so long for the agency to issue the permits.

Jacobs and members of the Moore family questioned why, when the Oregon Wolf Management Plan allows the ODFW to issue kill permits for wolves that have killed two livestock, the ODFW didn’t issue the kill permits after 19 sheep were killed at the Jacobs ranch.

Eddy said even though wolves in this part of the state have been dropped from federal Endangered Species Act protection, they are still protected under the Oregon Endangered Species Act, so there is a process that must be followed before ODFW can issue kill permits.

 The wolf management plan requires ODFW to try non-lethal means before pursuing lethal means to control wolves that kill livestock.

Because the wolves initially moved onto the Wallowa-Whitman and stayed away from Keating Valley ranches for a few months this spring and summer, it appeared that the non-lethal approaches were working.

Eddy confirmed that other wolves have moved into Oregon from Idaho, including a radio-collared Idaho wolf tagged as Idaho B300, which was retagged as Oregon OR2 because an Oregon radio collar was placed on the wolf after problems with its Idaho collar developed.

Dan Forsea, a Richland-area rancher and president of the Baker County Livestock Association, said he appreciated the county commission’s unanimous vote to spend $20,000 for predator control.

“We all know, when there is a problem, you have to address it. It doesn’t just go away on its own,” Forsea said.

He said the wolf attacks at the Jacobs and Moore ranches reflect learned behavior by the male and female pair confirmed to be responsible for most of those attacks.

“If we take care of some of the problem wolves, we can live with the other ones,” Forsea said.

In an e-mail response to the latest wolf attacks at the Jacobs ranch, Sean Stevens of Oregon Wild, a conservation group that favors the return of wolves to Oregon, said it was “quite the coincidence that this all went down right as Idaho opened their wolf hunt.”

“I think first and foremost, this incident shows that we’re lucky to have a clearly outlined wolf management plan, and that giving even more authority for folks to kill wolves is not necessary,” Stevens said.

“It’s certainly sad that these wolves will likely be killed given the relatively small population we have here in Oregon so far. We’re talking about maybe 25 percent of our wolves.

“The kill order also highlights the need to ensure that we are keeping wolf management in the hands of expert wildlife officials, and not sending folks out to hunt them for sport as we are seeing in Idaho,” Stevens said.

“Overall, we hope these two wolf killings are a minor setback in the continued effort to restore this native species to its important role in our natural systems,” he said.

Randy Moore, Tik Moore’s son, questioned how much groups defending the wolf reintroduction really care about wildlife and other animals.

“If those people really care about animals, what about the other animals the wolves kill?” Randy Moore said.

During Wednesday’s commission meeting, Jacobs held up a copy of the Western Farmer Stockman magazine and referred commissioners to a story describing how the wolf population has risen dramatically in Idaho since the federal government released captured wolves there in the mid 1990s.

As the state’s wolf population has increased to more than 800, widespread livestock predation and plummeting populations of deer and elk have been reported in some parts of Idaho.