After two confirmed wolf depredations eight days apart on his property in recent weeks, Bear Valley cattle rancher Alec Oliver has been awarded the first lethal take permit for a wolf in the history of Grant County.

Two adult female cows had their udders ripped apart on the Oliver Ranch in late October and early November, Oliver said, and one of them was hamstrung.

The two depredations come weeks prior to the seventh confirmed depredation in Grant County this year, investigated by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on Thursday, Nov. 16, and attributed to a radio-collared disperser wolf called OR131. An injured 9-month-old calf was attacked at Warm Springs Creek, near the Crook County line, according to a report.

“It’s unfortunate we have to see our livestock being eaten alive, but there’s little we can do to prevent it,” said Oliver, who has until the end of this year to kill one wolf on his land under his ODFW-issued lethal take permit.

In addition to the rash of livestock depredations in the county this year, a Grant County elk hunter shot and killed a wolf from the Logan Valley Pack near Seneca on Nov. 2 after the animal approached him despite his efforts to scare it away. Wildlife officials ruled the man acted in self-defense.

“This is going to drastically change the way people in animal production and agriculture are able to use the land and create a livelihood,” Oliver said.

“Not just people in agriculture,” he added. “Recreationally, anybody that likes the outdoors and nature is going to have to severely change that going forward with the impact of these alpha predators and this lack of fear for humans.”

Increasing impacts

Oregon had 178 known wolves at the end of 2022, up three from the year before, according to ODFW data, although the agency admits that number is a rock-bottom minimum. The tally included 24 established packs and 14 smaller groups of two or three wolves.

ODFW completed 121 wolf depredation investigations of dead or injured livestock last year, up from 90 investigations in 2021, with 76 confirmed depredations, according to the agency’s latest annual wolf report. Statewide, confirmed depredations increased 55% from 2021 to 2022, according to the report.

Oliver’s confirmed depredations were attributed to the Murderers Creek pair, a male and (presumptive) female wolf who also were deemed responsible for two depredations on May 29 and June 15, making four confirmed livestock depredations so far this year for the pair.

Oliver said in recent years he’s had a loss of about 25 calves each year — calves that don’t come back to the ranch from forest pasture for the colder months. This year’s loss amounted to 30 calves, he said. In addition to lower headcount, he’s also seen lower weaning weights and lower conception rates in his herds.

He attributes those impacts to wolves, either through direct predation or stresses to his cattle caused by the predators’ presence in the area.

“Those three things alone add up to a $230,000 impact a year to us,” Oliver said.

In the past year, Grant County cattle rancher Ken Holliday said he’s lost three calves that were deemed probable depredations by state wildlife officials. Ken and his wife, Pat Holliday, own the Holliday Land & Livestock Inc. ranch between John Day and Prairie City, along with a second location in Bear Valley.

“We’ve been thrown to the wolves,” Ken Holliday said. “What we see this year is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Holliday also raises cattle in the Luce Creek area near John Day, where one of his calves was lost to a wolf, he said.

“People might be surprised to know cattle prices right now are historically the highest they’ve ever been,” he said. “Those calves were $2.80 a pound. Every one of those calves was about $1,500.”

Continued expansion

With seven confirmed depredations on livestock this year and the killing of a wolf by an elk hunter in self-defense earlier this month, the wolves of Grant County have been gaining notoriety of late.

Experts say such incidents are indicative of the continued proliferation of wolves throughout Oregon, with populations of the animals having reached a saturation point in the northeastern part of the state in recent years.

“So as these wolf population saturations expand, just over the hill from Baker and Union counties is Grant County,” said John Williams, wolf committee chair for the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. “As that expands, you will see pretty much wolves will be everywhere in Grant County and depredations will increase as populations increase.”

Teresa Southworth, who owns Southworth Brothers Ranch in Bear valley with her husband, Jack Southworth, said the issue of wolves spreading throughout Grant County is something ranchers are going to be facing for a while.

“The wolves are going to disperse more, and they’re going into new territories,” she said, adding she and other Bear Valley ranchers get regular reports from wildlife managers showing the movement of radio-collared wolves in the area.

“Every morning they give us real quick reports on where a wolf was last pinged,” she said. “It’s really fascinating how far they travel from one day to the next. They can travel over 30 to 50 miles a night.”

Wolves were once native to Oregon but were gone from the state by the 1940s. They began to return after reintroduction programs in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s. The first wolf in Oregon in a half-century was found in Grant County in 1999 before being shipped back to Idaho.

Williams said Wallowa County reached wolf saturation about five years ago, with Baker and Union counties following in the past three or four years. He said the wolf dispersal has been moving south and west through the Blue Mountains.

“We have seen an expansion of wolves in Grant County over the last couple of years,” said Ryan Platte, an assistant wildlife biologist for ODFW. “For the longest time, the only pack we really knew about and confirmed was the Desolation Pack, and (then) you started to see, two or three years ago, more reports of wolves in other parts of the county. Now we have at least two more with the Murderers Creek pair and the Logan Valley Pack. Wolves are filling into available habitat in Grant County.”

Wolves were eradicated from the Oregon landscape through extermination programs by the 1940s.

“There’s definitely a reason our forefathers put so much energy and effort to eliminate these predators years ago,” Oliver said. “It’s one thing to deal with coyotes, cougars and bears, but this is such a different creature with the magnitude of their size, power and influence. They’re very impactful.”

Affected ranchers and industry experts say the impact of wolves on their business is much larger than the loss of one or two cows to depredation. The presence of a wolf or wolves on grazing lands can have larger economic consequences for a producer, said the cattlemen’s association’s Williams.

“The cost isn’t just one cow — it’s also the rest of the herd,” said Williams, who mentioned lower conception rates, lower cow weights and the loss of pasture land that can’t be used when wolves are in the area.

Lethal take permits are granted for affected livestock producers after certain criteria are met, including at least two confirmed depredations by the same wolf pack or group within a nine-month period. ODFW officials also must evaluate whether the livestock producer utilized nonlethal methods to prevent depredations.

But lethal take permits are only granted to qualifying producers east of Highway 395, which runs through the middle of Grant County and acts as a dividing line for wolf management in much of Oregon. Wolves are federally protected from being hunted west of the highway because they are considered endangered.

“You really can’t do anything on that side of the road,” Oliver said. “You literally have to watch the wolf eat your livelihood away. You can’t do anything to defend it.”

Seeking reform and relief

With wolves increasingly interfacing with agriculture in the state, the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association has sought wolf management and compensation reform for stock producers who face economic impacts caused by the predators.

In addition to depredation, or the killing of livestock by wolves, the stress put on cattle by the presence of a nearby wolf or a pack has led to producers experiencing lower conception rates and pregnant cows to abort, said Todd Nash, president of the OCA.

“I heard two accounts just a few days ago from producers,” he said. “They didn’t necessarily lose very many calves, but their (pregnancy) rates on their cows were down drastically. One producer who had 300 cows had 70 open cows … an open cow is a cow who didn’t get pregnant.”

Williams said state policy needs to shift to “proactive management,” where wolves from problematic packs could be killed without meeting ODFW’s high bar for lethal removal.

“We support the management of wolves, and when they become predators of livestock we fully believe they need to be lethally removed and that’s something we have as one of our principles right up front, so producers don’t have to live with that nightmare time and again,” Nash said.

“In the future, we need to change that so we don’t have to wait for two depredations and we don’t have to wait for the rancher to do non-lethal (mitigation efforts) and they don’t have to write a letter (requesting lethal control from ODFW),” Williams said. “We believe lethal take should be opened up when a certain threshold is hit. There needs to be wolf management units with a trigger, and when the trigger is met, proactive management should occur.”

Williams said the proposed trigger is yet to be determined, but it could be the number of packs or wolf population in an area or the presence of breeding pairs, among other things.

Earlier this year, in the last legislative session, the cattlemen’s association sought compensation reform in Salem. Instead of paying market value for a confirmed or probable depredation, the OCA is asking for a 7-to-1 multiplier to cover economic impact from all the stress-related effects on a herd and the inability to find cattle carcasses, Williams said.

Wildlife advocacy groups oppose the 7-to-1 proposal because they say it would disincentivize producers from using non-lethal methods with the value of lost livestock much larger than normal market value.

“We cannot support a 7-to-1 compensation,” said Sristi Kamal, deputy director of the Western Environmental Law Center. “If your cattle or any livestock is worth, let’s say $2,000 at fair market value, you will be compensated $14,000 for that same animal. … For us, this is not a tool that will incentivize producers to use non-lethals. If you are setting bad policy, that is disincentivizing protecting your livestock.”

The 7-to-1 proposal didn’t make it into law this year, but the cattlemen’s association plans to bring it back.

“We are going to take another run at that for sure,” Nash said. “It was a disappointment that a lot of policy bills did not get worked on due to some of the complications that took place in the Senate chamber. We fully intend to go back in the short session (next year) or the next long session in 2025.”