Washington's Wolf Advisory Group Update

The Washington Wolf Advisory Group met last week and were introduced to the recently hired wildlife-conflict specialist to hopefully reduce the tensions resulting from Washington’s ever growing wolf population. Washington Cattlemen’s Association Executive Vice President Jack Field attended the WWAG meeting and shares
Field: “The Department of Fish and Wildlife has retained the services of Francine Madden — she is a conflict-specialist. She led the Department on the first meeting we had last week. I’m not certain what the process will be because I believe her funding is included in the HB 2107 so I honestly don’t know how the Department plans on moving forward with that. But we spent quite a bit of time on team-building exercises and hoping we have a chance — I want to get down and start talk about the tough issues. We didn’t really have any thing of substance in regards to issue discussion.”
Field says the group did have a field trip to three different livestock operations in Northeastern Washington.
Field: “Each of those operators have had various interactions with wolves. It was good for the WWAG — especially for those non-livestock related members — to understand what wolf-livestock interactions mean and how each livestock operation needs to go about addressing wolf conflict. Probably the most important take home for the Department, the WWAG and everybody involved is that not one size fits all and we’ve got to have flexibility in the solutions and they got to be adaptive to be able to address variations and change.”