Recent WSU Wolf Study Has Some Flaws

Recent WSU Wolf Study Has Some Flaws

Recently Washington State University released a research paper concerning livestock depredation by wolves — stating that by killing wolves who kill livestock in the long run would only cause more livestock depredation. Now this is the exact opposite of what I’ve heard from the livestock ranchers who work day in and day out in areas with a large wolf populations.
Western Wyoming sheep producer and editor of The Shepherd magazine Cat Urbigkit — also had some issues with WSU’s research paper.
Urbigkit: “The entire paper is based on the assumption that breeding pairs of wolves are responsible for most livestock depredations. Then it provided a couple of citations that was supposed to support that statement. I’m very interested in that idea — it could be true - it may not be true — I didn’t know that there was actually anything that said that. I went through and looked at the references and realized that those references didn’t say what the paper said that it said. That was the first alarm bell that went off; but I found the researchers really cherry picked the information that they were going to used.”
Urbigkit continues
Urbigkit: “The notion that they would ignore that fact that if you don’t control the wolves who are killing livestock — what do they think will happen? The wolves don’t stop killing livestock once they’ve started. In 2012 here in Wyoming we have three packs of wolves were responsible for 70 percent of the sheep depredation in our state. If you do not go in and control the wolves that are causing the problems they will return and that happens over and over..”
More with Urbigkit tomorrow.
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