Since wolves were reintroduced, some eastern Arizona ranchers claim the animals have destroyed their lives

by Leo W. Banks

     Dean Warren has a story to tell about how Mexican Gray wolves stole one of the best parts of his life.
     He was on horseback on a mountain trail south of Rose Peak, in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, when four wolves attacked him and his six blue tick hounds, setting off a ferocious struggle.
     "Picture 10 animals in a dogfight under your horse, and you know what I'm talking about," says Warren, then a rancher and range deputy for the Greenlee County Sheriff's Office.
     "I'm being attacked by wolves!" he hollered into his police radio. "I need help!"
He yelled and fired shots into the air, but the wolves kept coming. The desperate brawl lasted two hours. Warren's fighting retreat brought him to Sawmill Cabin, where he closed himself inside a barn, the animals pacing and howling outside.
     Something--probably the arrival of rescuers--caused them to quit, and Warren, 62 years old at the time and a crack outdoorsman, headed home, considering himself lucky. If his horse hadn't been accustomed to dogs, he says he could've been thrown to the ground and injured or killed.
     But the funny part, the tragic part, the unbelievable part, is the idea of a cowboy, alone, in a death struggle with vicious animals--and what's running through his mind, apart from not turning into wolf kibble?
     Lawyers.
     "I definitely felt threatened, but I knew that if I shot those wolves, I could pay a huge fine and maybe get years in jail," says Warren. "Hiring a lawyer would break me. I don't have that kind of money in my hip pocket."
     Welcome to the government's version of the Wild West.
    ..."The wolves ate me out of house and home, and I had to quit the cattle business," says Harold Filleman, patriarch of an eastern Arizona ranching family. "It wasn't profitable anymore. The only thing we could figure was to pull out and wait until the government stops funding these wolves."
     Like Warren, Filleman lived on Eagle Creek, 30 miles above Clifton.
    ...Once on the ground, the wolves did their part to rattle nerves even more. Shortly after their release, they staked out Scott Dieringer's ranch, about 8 miles above the Creek.
    Gary Bowen, who helped Dieringer through the ordeal, said the wolves "created constant turmoil" and behaved so aggressively that if either Scott or his wife went to town, the other had to stay home to keep the animals from attacking their stock and dogs.
     Once, in April 1999, the Dieringers looked out their living room window and saw three wolves in their front yard, one entering his corral. Dieringer went outside with a rifle, and after the animals attacked his dog, he fired shots into the air to scare them off.
     "The wolves just stood and looked at me," wrote Dieringer, in a letter to the Eastern Arizona Courier. He threw rocks, but they dodged them. After the wolves chased Dieringer back to his house, he and his wife jumped into their truck and left to get help.
     Dieringer didn't get to see his grandchildren at Easter that year because the ranch was too dangerous to visit. In his letter, Dieringer explained why he'd decided to pack up and leave: "We fear for ourselves, our dogs and our livestock, and feel we have no way to defend ourselves."
     Some in the area say they live with bouts of stress and sleeplessness, wondering if that sound they heard in the night might be a wolf looking for a snack.
     Retiree Ed Fitch found a wolf chasing his baby foal and her mother, penned up beside his barn. He ran the wolf off, but not before it forced the foal into a fence, badly cutting her face.
     A wolf chased Ed's wife, Edie, down a hill near their home, and the Fitches say that when they walk their dogs at night, they carry a gun just in case.
     THE ELY FAMILY, OF THE 4 Drag Ranch, have just emerged from a hellish period last year, during which an unusually aggressive wolf pack targeted their cattle.
     Clifton's Copper Era newspaper described one episode in which Gary Ely and two cowboys came upon a wolf feeding on the hindquarters of a live heifer.
     "The anguishing screams of the calf shocked them all," Darcy Ely told the paper. "You could hear this horrible wailing. My husband fell apart over this, and so did the rest of the crew."
     The Elys--wrung out and hardly fans of the pro-environmentalist press, according to friends--wouldn't respond to several messages seeking comment. But one neighbor estimates they lost between 100-200 cows, most to wolves, they contend, each worth a conservative average of $400.
     As Darcy Ely told the Copper Era, she and Gary have begged the feds to come out to their wolf-cattle kill sites; they also moved their cattle to repeatedly to protect them from the wolves. "Now the wolves are in the middle of the pasture," she says. "Where do we go now?"
     The Elys are still hanging on. But of the eight families living along the Creek proper, all of whom ran cattle in the late 1990s, only two do so now, according to Frank Hayes, chief of the Forest Service's Clifton district, a reduction in cattle numbers of 70 percent.
     It's not because of wolves, he says. It's the drought. Ranchers agree the drought has been bad, but say piling wolves on top of it has creamed their bottom lines.

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This article is from 2003, but given recent events is worthy of review.