Predator makes kills in Two Dot area
By BRETT FRENCH, Billings Gazette [here]
TWO DOT - Her voice tinged with emotion and the video camera jiggling in her shaking hand, Tonya Martin filmed and narrated the scene she found behind her ranch home March 5 - five sheep had been killed by a wolf and another five were wounded, three of them, as it turned out, fatally.
“In the end, it’s hard to watch what your animals go through,” said Martin, 36, while showing the location of the slaughter on Thursday. “It makes me question what the future will be with them.”
Martin was driving a tractor out to feed her cow-calf pairs around 8:30 a.m. on March 5 when her mother-in-law, Katherine Martin, spotted the big black wolf. The wolf trotted out of the brush, crossed the county road, went under a barbed-wire fence and paused to look back.
“We knew what it was right away,” she said. “Our first instinct was to go after it.”
At the time, Martin didn’t know the wolf had killed five of her sheep. Had she known, the .222 rifle that always rides in the tractor could have been used to legally kill the wolf. It wasn’t until the Martins investigated that they found the sheep flighty and hiding in the barren cottonwood trees along Big Elk Creek. Scattered around the drainage were five dead sheep and five others that were injured.
A veterinarian was called to patch up the five injured sheep, most of them with torn throats, but only two of those survived.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Martin said. “Some were hamstrung, their legs were broken and twisted. I’d never seen kills like it before. The sheep were scared to death.”
“It was a sad day, because I know he’ll be back, and he’ll be back with friends.” … [more]