Agency revises standards for investigating livestock deaths in wolf country
The Department of Agriculture compensates ranchers in eastern Arizona when their cattle are killed by Mexican wolves, a species protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The agency has set new standards for what constitutes a wolf kill.
The program is administered by Wildlife Services, which is also authorized to kill predators that pose a threat.
The agency frequently blamed wolves when cows turned up dead. But Greta Anderson, of the nonprofit Western Watersheds Project, said that livestock can die for a number of reasons, such as disease, or giving birth.
She began to look at the agency’s reports, and found that the cause of some kills were hard to pin down.
"And there was very little evidence contained in the reports to suggest that it was definitely a wolf kill, that it wasn’t just a wolf scavenge, that wolves had anything to do with it. I mean some of the reports were, you know, nothing more than a pile of bones," she said.
Last year, a whistleblower filed a complaint on the agency, which drew media attention to the agency's rush to judgment, which resulted in payouts to ranchers, and in some cases, wolves being killed.
"Some of the things that were being confirmed as wolf kills, looked really inconclusive," she said.
The new standard would require the agency to show evidence the animal was alive when the attack took place.
