Washington State University researchers have found that it is counter-productive to kill wolves to keep them from preying¹ on livestock². Shooting and trapping lead to more dead sheep and cattle the following year, not fewer. Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, WSU wildlife biologist Rob Wielgus and data analyst³ Kaylie Peebles say that, for each wolf killed, the odds⁴ of more livestock depredations⁵ increase significantly.

 

The trend continues until 25 percent of the wolves in an area are killed. Ranchers and wildlife managers then see a "standing⁶ wave of livestock depredations," said Wielgus.

 

Moreover, he and Peebles write, that rate of wolf mortality "is unsustainable and cannot be carried out indefinitely if federal relisting of wolves is to be avoided."

 

The gray wolf was federally listed as endangered in 1974. During much of its recovery in the northern Rocky Mountains, government predator⁷ control efforts have been used to keep wolves from attacking sheep and livestock. With wolves delisted in 2012, sport hunting has also been used. But until now, the effectiveness of lethal⁸ control has been what Wielgus and Peebles call a "widely accepted, but untested, hypothesis."

 

Their study is the largest of its kind, analyzing⁹ 25 years of lethal control data from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Interagency Annual Wolf Reports in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. They found that killing¹⁰ one wolf increases the odds of depredations 4 percent for sheep and 5 to 6 percent for cattle the following year. If 20 wolves are killed, livestock deaths double.

 

Work reported in PLOS ONE last year by Peebles, Wielgus and other WSU colleagues found that lethal controls of cougars¹¹ also backfire, disrupting their populations so much that younger, less disciplined cougars attack more livestock.

点击收听单词发音