Stopping Wolves From Killing Livestock: Could It Be As Simple as an Electrified Flag Line?

None of the many tools for deterring predators from killing livestock is able to claim it’s the proverbial “silver bullet” for the job, yet an innovative combination of two such tools has generated some encouraging results. Dubbed “turbofladry,” it consists of flapping flags tied on a wire fence and the electric fence itself, which delivers a stinging zap to anyone (human, predator or livestock) foolish enough to touch a charged wire. Fladry, an east European term, is simply a string of closely spaced strips of flapping cloth. Hunters have used strings of fladry to block unsuspecting wolves, then driven the wolves into a fladry bottleneck, where gunners were waiting. Incredibly, wolves won’t cross a fladry line to escape, even when they are desperate to do so. For three summers, Lava Lake Land and Livestock, which grazes sheep on the Sawtooth and Salmon-Challis National Forests, made use of turbofladry and experienced only one lost sheep to wolves. And that sheep wasn’t inside the turbofladry fence. With more than 6,000 sheep, Lava Lake runs one of the largest sheep outfits in the region on more than 800,000 acres of private and public land. A few summers prior, wolves killed 25 sheep on one of their grazing allotments...more