Free-ranging market could save wolves

Get your rifles ready: Wolf season opens in Montana and Idaho in early September, and for as little as $11.50 you've got a better chance than ever of bagging this toothy predator. In July, Montana doubled its kill quota to 220, and Idaho, well, it has declined to set a quota. Wyoming plans to treat wolves as predators in most of the state, allowing them to be killed on sight starting next fall. If all goes according to plan, the Rocky Mountain​ wolf population will be knocked down 60 percent from its peak of 1,733 in 2009. This is obviously a perfectly sound strategy for preserving an iconic American species, which taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars breeding and feeding. No, not wolves, but public-lands ranchers, whose livestock graze on federal property and who are increasingly concerned about attacks by free-ranging wolf packs. During this 15-year saga over wolves in the West, which pits conservationists against cowboys, it was easy to miss that the most outspoken cattlemen were not simply asking to guard their private property from deadly intruders. They were defending their right to pay rock-bottom prices to let their cattle graze unchaperoned on 162 million acres of federal land. Conservationists were forced to claim these open spaces, vilifying ranchers and hunters and tying up federal regulators in a two- year lawsuit that was ultimately circumvented by Congress. Federal grazing policies seem designed to foster conflict rather than cooperation. The future of both wolves and ranchers depends, in part, on reforming our archaic and noncompetitive system through a shift to transferrable federal grazing permits sold on a regulated market...more