Wildlife and People

Laura Schneberger On Ranching With Wolves

My friend and admin of Wolf Crossing, Laura Schneberger, spoke at the Society for Range Management, New Mexico Section, annual meeting in Albuquerque last month. Various scientific presentations were also given, but Laura’s talk was the highlight of the event and made the papers.

Reporter David Bowser of Livestock Weekly wrote an in-depth article about Laura’s speech, and we post it in full below. Livestock Weekly has a website [here], but some features, including this one, are for members only. We were given permission to post it by Wolf Crossing [here].

Failures Of Feds’ Wolf Program Outlined At Range Society Meet

By David Bowser, Livestock Weekly, Mar 10th, 2009 [here]

ALBUQUERQUE — Laura Schneberger says the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Program is not a program that she or her neighbors asked for.

“It’s a government-sponsored program that nobody in the community wanted,” Schneberger says. “Nobody in the community surrounding the whole region wanted it.”

Speaking at the Society for Range Management annual meeting here, she said the people in the area are being made scapegoats for the failures in the program.

Schneberger is a fifth generation rancher. She and her husband own the Rafter Spear Ranch near Winston, N.M.

“I’ve got three children,” Schneberger said.

She has a grown daughter who’s married, a 20 year-old daughter and a 10 year-old son at home.

“We’ve been dealing with this wolf program probably since 1996 when the EIS (Environmental Impact Study) was first begun,” Schneberger said. “We’ve lived in the region of the Mexican wolf program the entire time. Both of our daughters grew up with Mexican wolves out and around the house, and our son was born about the time they did the first releases.”

She said her perspective on the Mexican Wolf Recovery Program is different than that of researchers studying the wolf and its habitat.

“It’s not about just the economic end of it when you have Mexican wolves in your cattle,” Schneberger said. “In the Gila, where I run the local grazing association, the ranches are a lot smaller than they are in Idaho, Montana and even Wyoming.”

The grazing association has about 150 members.

“There are some people who run 50 or 60 head of livestock,” Schneberger said. “That’s what they make a majority of their living on and then, of course, they work outside or do something else to make a living, like build saddles or guide elk hunters.”

The largest ranch in the area, she said, has about 300 to 400 head of cattle.

“The Adobe Ranch and the Slash Ranch put together are probably the very biggest,” Schneberger said. “They’re on the northern end of the Gila, and they’re significant ranges.”

Some research has been conducted concerning the Mexican wolves on those ranches.

Schneberger said it can be devastating to have a wolf pack on a ranch.

“Especially wolf packs that are being managed the way that these are being managed,” she said. “You don’t sleep at night when you know that you’ve got wolves on you and that they’ve started killing. You wake up every time some noise happens outside. Your kids have nightmares. You have nightmares. You can’t sleep. The kids can’t play outside. It can be a real mess.”

Schneberger said the wolves with which she’s dealt aren’t terribly shy or hesitant about coming in around homes.

“There have been numerous encounters between men and wolves and children,” she said.

Schneberger said the Gila is not much of a core recovery area because there are families and people dispersed all around it.

The Gila includes a 3.3 million-acre national forest and wilderness area. The Gila Wilderness was the first designated wilderness in the country. It was established in 1924.

“I can look out my south window from my kitchen and see the Gila Wilderness boundary 100 yards away,” Schneberger said. “A lot of people live right around that boundary, and the wolves don’t seem to want to stay inside of it.”

She said both her daughters have encountered wolves. In those instances, the girls were horseback.

“One was 16 at the time,” Schneberger said. “The other was 14.”

Her 14 year-old encountered two wolves, she said, and it was scary.

“They kind of backed her up a little bit,” Schneberger said. “They squared off with her. She was a little frantic when she finally got home.”

The girl had a .22 with her and shot it off a couple of times in the air, Schneberger said.

“They finally sauntered away from her,” Schneberger said. “She was pretty distressed by it.”

That girl is 20 years old now.

“Since then,” Schneberger said, “we’ve had several things happen, but nothing too major.”

Her neighbors, however, are another story.

She said children on horseback have had encounters with wolves. A child found his dog in his front yard after the dog had been slaughtered by wolves. Children have been followed by wolves from the bus stop.

“We had a child, 14 years old, old enough to be out with his rifle on his own, but not too far from his dad, surrounded by the Luna Pack on a hunting trip,” Schneberger said. “He was backed against a tree in a burned area.”

When asked why the boy didn’t shoot one of the wolves, he answered that he was afraid the government would take away his father’s grazing permit.
Schneberger said one eight year-old girl was returning to her house after putting the horses in the barn. Her dog jumped on a wolf that was following her.

Her parent heard the girl’s screams, came running outside and had to throw rocks at the wolf to get it off the dog. The dog had massive vet bills, Schneberger added.

A month later, that same family had a horse killed by wolves in the corral by the house.

“Many of us have experienced the surplus killing that these wolves have been capable of doing,” Schneberger said.

According to the government’s rules, these wolves should have been removed, she noted.

“It’s not ambiguous,” Schneberger said of the rules. “It’s not vague.”

In 2008, she said, the Fish and Wildlife Service and other planning agencies chose to leave all the problem wolves on the ground.

“They weren’t meeting the numbers they thought they should be meeting,” Schneberger explained. “They stopped entirely managing for human needs other than the Mexican Wolf Foundation’s efforts to do some flattery and possibly pay for some range riders in a few areas.”

This change in management has resulted in the rise of illegal shootings this past year, she said.

“I’m not sure the two are connected,” Schneberger added, “but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see when people are irritable and angry and they’re seeing no relief.”

She said that has been one of the major problems with this program.

“There is a violation of the trust component.”

She said there has been an enormous turnover in the program’s personnel.

“Most of the new people don’t even know the people on the ground anymore,” Schneberger said. “They just go in there and pick up their little wolf monitor and don’t bother to call anyone or let anybody know what’s happening.”

It’s no wonder people are irritated, she continued.

In 2005 in Idaho, she said, there were 650 wolves on the ground.

“They had 190 depredations that year,” Schneberger added.

That’s .29 kills for every wolf.

In Arizona and New Mexico in 2006,” she said, “there were an estimated 60 wolves with 36 confirmed depredations.”

On a per-wolf basis, there were more depredations with fewer wolves.

“Something’s really going on in Arizona and New Mexico and the Southwest program,” Schneberger said. “Why is the killing twice as bad with a lot fewer wolves?”

She thinks it’s due to different factors.

“The Fish and Wildlife has a policy of translocation,” she said. “That means re-releasing the problem animals from one area to another area.”

Usually, she said, they pick the wolves up out of one area and put them into New Mexico, hoping they’ll do better.

“The funny thing is that statistics show that the ones that they pick up and remove and they put back actually do better as wolves and have more days in the wild,” Schneberger said. “Well, when the rules say you’re supposed to remove them when they kill livestock, but at the same time the statistics show that they’re doing better in the wild, we’ve got a little problem there.”

She said that apparently doesn’t create a problem if a person works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but it’s a problem for ranchers.

“Failure to control wolves that begin preying on livestock in an agricultural area, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist again to know that if you don’t deal with something that’s chronically preying on livestock, it’s going to teach its pups,” Schneberger pointed out.

She said other wolves will migrate to the area.

“It’s going to be a disaster as we saw in 2006, when the Ring Pack and the San Francisco Pack got together and worked a bigger territory than they would have otherwise,” Schneberger said. “They killed and killed and killed.”

Another problem is the temporary removal of wolves that have killed livestock. The wolves are removed for a year and then released in a different area.

“We have a lot of little things that we deal with that a lot of people don’t hear about from Fish and Wildlife press releases.”

She said people in the area put up with coyotes, bears and mountain lions, but wolves are a particular problem.

“Studies show that wolves are more likely to prey on livestock than any other species,” Schneberger said. “We’ve found that to be true, definitely true.”

She pointed out that while wolf depredation on livestock nationally is not large, it can be a devastating problem at an individual and regional level.

“People have been put out of business in our area because of livestock depredation levels.”

She pointed to studies in the Great Lakes region that indicate depredation isn’t necessarily related to carcass consumption.

Various activist groups are pressuring the Fish and Wildlife Service to force ranchers to remove carcasses from the range, claiming that wolves are being attracted by dead cattle. Their reasoning is that if the carcasses are removed, the depredation issue will go away.

“So far,” Schneberger countered, “what we’ve seen is that the wolves only chew on the carcasses that they make.”

She said they may occasionally find a carcass, but it’s not related.

The Gila is rough country, she reminded. If a cow dies up in a canyon, it’s not going to get removed for a few days.

“What are you supposed to do?” Schneberger asked.

If the rule is implemented, a rancher could lose his livestock grazing permit.

“That’s one of the problems we worry about,” Schneberger said.

But that’s not stopping the killing of livestock.

She talks about a female wolf that was put out in the wild by the Fish and Wildlife Service and attacked a cow that was probably calving.

“She was a first-calf heifer,” Schneberger said, “so she really didn’t know what to do. She was in labor and a bit confused about everything.”

Schneberger said she’s gotten a lot of reports of wolves pulling calves out of cows.

During the same 24-hour period as the first-calf heifer was attacked, another cow was attacked. Her reproductive organs and udder were mangled.

“Her production days are over,” Schneberger pointed out. “You kind of need those parts on your cows.”

Between the two calves that were probably on these cows or coming out of them, only one leg was found.

“This all happened in a 24-hour period,” Schneberger repeated. “Right about then we learned that the Fish and Wildlife Service had just written a standard operating procedure supposedly under the direction of the Adaptive Management Oversight Committee that is supposed to include ranchers and conservationists and everybody, but we never saw this, and we weren’t included.”

That standard operating procedure said that any depredation that happens in a 24-hour period would be considered one depredation incident.

“This is what comes out in the press releases,” Schneberger said. “One depredation incident.”

Multiple kills are now considered one incident if they happen in one 24-hour period.

“The new standard operating procedures were implemented.”

She said she thought the old rule was pretty clear, that livestock-depredating wolves would be removed.

“It makes it kind of hard with the new politics, the ever-shifting, ever-raising-the-bar ways of managing.”

Under the new rules, each wolf will be given three livestock depredation incidents before being removed.

“And still the death toll keeps rising,” Schneberger said.

A number of depredations occurred on the San Carlo Apache Reservation and the tribe was adamant that the wolves be removed.

“They removed them,” Schneberger said, “and they kept them in captivity for about a year, gave them a new name, and put them into New Mexico.”

Finally, the extremists got their way in 2008 when the Fish and Wildlife Service decided not to remove any more livestock-depredating wolves, Schneberger said.

“Extremist environmental organizations demand in the media that the agency stop removing problem wolves.”