Wild gray wolves have killed dozens of livestock in the Sierra Nevada mountains in recent months, prompting California wildlife officials to take the extreme action of killing several of the animals, authorities announced on Friday.
“This decision was not made lightly nor was it easy,” said Charlton H. Bonham, director of California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), in a statement on Friday.
Between March 28 and Sept. 10, the CDFW said wolves from the Beyem Seyo pack in the Sierra Valley were responsible for 70 livestock losses, accounting for 63% of total livestock losses across the entire state during that time period.
The department spent months trying to deter the wolves from killing the livestock, including using drones, non-lethal bean bag rounds, and all-terrain vehicles. They weren’t successful.
“These wolves became habituated to cattle as a primary food source, a behavioral shift that threatens both livestock and the ecological integrity of wolf recovery,” the CDFW said.
Wildlife officers lethally removed a male and female breeding pair of wolves, another female, and another male. Additionally, a juvenile wolf that was mistaken for the breeding male was unintentionally killed, officials said. The remains of two additional juveniles from the Beyem Seyo this pack were found, but they apparently died before the adults were killed.
Gray wolves, native to California, were eradicated by the mid-1920s. Their return began with OR-7, a wolf from Oregon who entered California in late 2011.
The first packs were confirmed in Washington and Oregon in 2008, followed by California in 2015. By the end of 2024, wildlife officials counted 75 individual wolf pack territories across the three states.
Officials say the decision to lethally remove wolves in this instance shouldn’t be viewed as a setback to the reintroduction program.
“Several things can be true simultaneously,” said Bonham. “Wolves are here in California and that is an amazing ecological return. Yet, their reemergence is a significant, disruptive change for rural communities. Wolves are one of the state’s most iconic species and coexistence is our collective future, but that comes with tremendous responsibility and sometimes hard decisions.”
According to the CDFW, California’s wolves primarily live in the northeast, with a single pack established in the southern Sierra Nevada.
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