As wolves return, so do tensions with ranchers

When the cougar trackers finally figured out it wasn’t a big cat that was wiping out Dave Dashiell’s livestock, the wolves already were on their way to killing or wounding 33 sheep. By then even dogs, traps and specialists armed with lights, paintball guns and rubber bullets couldn’t keep the wolves and livestock apart. “There were days when I walked down a drainage and when I came back two hours later there was a dead lamb where I walked,” Dashiell’s tearful wife, Julie, told a state wildlife panel last weekend. And by the time a government aerial hunter aboard a helicopter unintentionally shot and killed a breeding female wolf amid the cedar, grand fir and thick underbrush of Dashiell’s Stevens County grazing land, the outrage had reached almost everyone. Less than a decade after the state’s first wolf pack in 70 years returned to Eastern Washington’s timbered mountains and dry-grass lowlands, tempers have returned to a boil. But with the state’s wolf packs now numbering 15 and wolf populations growing 38 percent in six years, these conflicts, in some ways, are the price of success...more