State fish and wildlife officials authorized the killing of six gray wolves in Eastern Oregon during the past six weeks, bringing relief to ranchers who lost livestock to the wolves and heartache and anger to conservationists who see the killings as inhumane and ineffective.
The six wolves were caught with foothold traps and then shot by employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division. They were killed in Union and Wallowa counties after preying on privately owned livestock, according to Beth Quillian, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
For the state fish and wildlife agency to issue a permit for the killing of wolves, ranchers must document at least two incidents of livestock predation within nine consecutive months and alternative mitigation strategies must have failed, according to Quillian.
But conservationists say it doesn’t make sense to kill the limited number of wolves in Oregon. Amaroq Weiss, a senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, points to the numbers. The state has over a million cows and more than 160,000 sheep. Until 2021, gray wolves in Oregon were on the federal Endangered Species List, and as of late 2022, there were 178 in the state. That’s up from just 173 in 2020 and 175 in 2021, according to Oregon’s fish and wildlife department.
