Federal agents have more time, and more space, for their hunt of two wolves in Northeast Oregon.
ODFW is giving USDA’s Wildlife Services another week to kill two wolves from the Imnaha pack. The original deadline was June 11, it’s been moved to June 18. The area where the hunting is allowed has been expanded to about 15-square miles.
Otherwise the rules of engagement are pretty much the same. The hunt is limited to privately owned pasture land, and only wolves without collars can be killed. That’s designed to make sure only wolves that show an interest in going after livestock are hunted, and to protect the breeding pair of the Imnaha pack. The alpha male and alpha female both have radio collars – they are the only known breeding pair in the state.
Meanwhile, ODFW confirms a new wolf kill on June 4th. So far this year, the agency has confirmed six calves killed in six attacks, all of them taking place in Wallowa County.
“A Troubling Development”
Rob Klavins of Oregon Wild says extending the hunt is both “troubling” and “inappropriate.”
“No depredations have been confirmed since last week,” he says. “The point of the hazing, the kill authorization, and the wolf plan itself is to reduce conflict, not to kill wolves as some radical special interests might wish. We understood that if future depredations did not occur, the authorization would expire.”
A State Of Emergency?
Momentum is growing in Wallowa County to declare a state of emergency because of the wolf attacks. A resolution before the County Commission says the state’s Wolf Management Plan isn’t working. It calls on the state to spend emergency funds to hire more staff to administer the Wolf Plan, to radio collar all the wolves in Wallowa County, and to give residents real-time information on where the wolves are located.
But environmental groups are concerned that ODFW is giving ranchers too much information, making it easier to wolf opponents to illegally kill the animals. A letter from Oregon Wild and the Hells Canyon Preservation Council calls on ODFW to withhold GPS data on where wolves are located, while at the same time warning ranchers when wolves are close to their homes.
Related Stories:
Time To Speak Up For Oregon’s Wolves
ODFW Okays Killing Of Two Wolves In Wallowa County
To List Or Delist Wolves? Federal Judge Hears Arguments In June
Quoting Rob Klavins of Oregon Wild: “The point of the hazing, the kill authorization, and the wolf plan itself is to reduce conflict, not to kill wolves as some radical special interests might wish.”
Who is this so called “radical special interest group”? Wallowa county and it’s citizens? Sounds like Oregon Wild is becoming more of a radical special interest group itself, and I normally support them 100%. Not this time.
Anonymous – okay, I’ll bite. Wolves are a native species and have a legitimate place on the landscape. Their extermination from our state is one of Oregon’s greatest environmental tragedies & their return has the potential to be one of our greatest success stories. But only if we move beyond a frontier mentality and learn to live with them. As I believe we can.
Oregon Wild advocates for healthy populations of all native wildlife from wolves and salmon to elk and spotted owls. With only 14 confirmed wolves in 2 packs statewide, shooting them should be the option of absolute last resort.
If that’s a radical agenda, then so be it, but the vast majority of Oregonians, including plenty of folks from Wallowa County with whom I talk on a regular basis welcome the news of wolves returning to Oregon and are horrified that some are so eager to see them killed.
On the other hand, a vocal, fearful, and yes – radical minority are only too happy to see wolves again eliminated from Oregon.
I’ll restate that the point of the wolf plan, hazing, and even lethal measures is not to kill wolves. It’s to reduce conflict and allow wolf populations to recover. If the depredations have stopped, there is no need to extend the kill authorization unless the point in the first place was just to kill a couple wolves.
It’s beginning to seem more like interspecies revenge killing than sound management of an extremely endangered species.
Rob Klavins
Oregon Wild
How can a species which has a population close to 60,000 on the continent be considered “extremely endangered”?
Sounds to me like Rob Klavens is soon to become the enemy of our beloved state. Rob just because the fed’s accepted the taxonomy changes doesn’t mean it is right. This species was a “non essential, experimental” project that went way wrong. Get your facts straight man, before you embarrass the state of Oregon with your DOW political junk. We don’t buy this nonsense of you thinking you know the truth, when in fact there are so many of us that know what kind of BS your spouting. We sill soon be forcing Idaho to clean up the “toxic” waist these wolves are leaving in our state lands. (WOLF WORMS).