Under pressure from critics, federal officials have adopted stricter standards for determining if endangered wolves are killing livestock in Arizona and New Mexico.
The Wildlife Services branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a new set of “Standards of Evidence” for investigating suspected attacks on cattle and other domestic animals in parts of Eastern Arizona and Western New Mexico where Mexican gray wolves have been reintroduced.
The move comes after an analysis by wolf advocates and a whistleblower complaint from within Wildlife Services showing that wolves were being blamed — and in some cases captured or killed — for cattle deaths based on little or no evidence.
“It remains to be seen how this will play out on the ground, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the subjective standards that were being used before,” said Greta Anderson, Tucson-based deputy director for the conservation group Western Watersheds Project. “Our goal has been to make sure that Mexican gray wolves aren’t being unfairly blamed for livestock depredation.”
The group conducted an analysis of federal investigation reports from the past five years that showed significant errors, conflicting details and logical leaps in many of the cases. Wolves were blamed for killing cattle based on evidence Anderson called “indistinguishable from scavenging,” such as a single bone or a scrap of dried hide that had to be soaked for weeks before it was soft enough for tooth marks to be found.
Wearing a new radio collar, a Mexican gray wolf is released back into its home range in New Mexico after being captured at the 2022 annual wolf count.
The new standards require more definitive evidence that a wolf was involved, including signs of bleeding below the skin and underlying tissue damage that proves the domestic animal was still alive when it was attacked.
Wildlife Services announced the change on Tuesday, after a year spent reviewing “the best available science,” practices in other states and comments from the public, agency officials said.
The new standards align with what investigators from Wildlife Services and state agencies already use in Montana, Wisconsin, Oregon and Idaho, officials said.
Whistleblower
“We’re happy to see these standards tighten, of course,” said Chris Smith, southwest wildlife advocate for Santa Fe, New Mexico-based WildEarth Guardians. “But extremely endangered species were wrongly killed before this improvement. And history suggests corruption and a deep-seated antagonism to wolves within the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
Robert Gosnell can speak to that. The 31-year federal employee spent about 18 months as state director for Wildlife Services in New Mexico, and he said he noticed right away that far too many livestock deaths were being blamed on wolves with very little supporting evidence. When he tried to address the situation, he said he was punished and transferred out of the state, leading to a successful retaliation complaint against the government.
“They were trying their best to get rid of me,” said Gosnell, who now works for USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Arkansas.
He said no set of new standards will do any good if the people in the field investigating livestock deaths don’t have the necessary motivation, training or scientific background. “The real issue is to get technicians in the field to do their jobs and not buddy up to the ranchers,” he said.
Gosnell said he pushed to have at least some of the cases they investigated cross-checked by a veterinarian, who could perform a necropsy on the dead animal and collect DNA samples to determine forensically how it died and what fed on it. That idea was shot down by his superiors, he said.
Wildlife Services is responsible for investigating livestock deaths and removing so-called “problem” predators when necessary.
In Arizona and New Mexico, investigations have led to some wolves being hunted down and killed, while others have been captured alive to be kept in captivity or moved to other parts of the massive experimental release area.
Such relocations can be complicated, since livestock grazing is allowed year-round on public land in the Gila National Forest, which includes some of the best Mexican gray wolf habitat in the region.
New Mexico is the only state where wolves and livestock overlap each other on the landscape every month of the year.
Reports by Wildlife Services also are used to determine compensation for ranchers whose animals are injured or killed. According to data from the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog organization specializing in agricultural subsidies, ranchers in New Mexico’s Catron County alone have received more than $3 million from the USDA’s Livestock Indemnity Program since 2015.
Anderson said all those compensation payments were for animal deaths blamed on wolves.
“That’s a lot of dead cows. That’s a lot of hungry wolves,” she said. “I never believed those numbers. The problem was they never had to provide any proof. Now they have to prove it.”
But Gosnell doesn’t expect much to change. As far as he is concerned, updating the standards is a “white wash” that does little more than repackage guidelines Wildlife Services already had and was supposed to be using.
“They’re trying to smooth things over with this on both sides: the ranchers that want the money and the environmentalists that say, ‘No, protect the wolves,’” Gosnell said.
Livestock operators argue that current compensation programs address only about a quarter of the actual losses that cattle producers experience from wolves.
The New Mexico Cattle Growers Association has described the wolf recovery program as broken and “being wielded as a tool to remove people from the landscape.”
Rising numbers
The Mexican subspecies of gray wolf was once common in parts of the southwestern United States and Mexico, but by the 1970s it had been hunted, trapped and poisoned to near-extinction.
Since 1998, wildlife managers have been releasing and monitoring captive-bred wolves in Eastern Arizona and Western New Mexico as part of a cooperative effort among nine federal, state and tribal agencies led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
As of February, wildlife officials estimated at least 241 wolves living in the wild, an increase of 23% over the previous year.
That marked the seventh consecutive year of growth and the first time the population has topped 200 since reintroduction began.
The wolves are divided into at least 59 packs, with 136 of the animals in New Mexico and 105 in Arizona.
Another 380 Mexican gray wolves are being kept in captivity at more than 60 facilities in the U.S. and Mexico as part of the survival plan for the species, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
But the endangered predator isn’t out of the woods yet.
Advocates warn of extinction for the subspecies as result its low numbers and inbreeding.
Earlier in August, conservationists sent a letter to Fish and Wildlife officials calling for wolves to be released in more places, including the southern Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon area to backstop a parallel recovery effort in Mexico that is “badly faltering.”
The letter, signed by more than a dozen environmental groups, estimates that just four collared animals and 18 wolves total are all that remain in the wild in Mexico after 12 years of reintroduction efforts.
“Biologists in Mexico are heroically trying to keep lobos alive on private lands where there are few deer and no elk,” said Michael Robinson, a senior conservation advocate at the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. “That shouldn’t give U.S. authorities a pass to shirk Mexican gray wolf recovery in the Southwest.”
Trail camera footage from 2019 shows at least seven pups from the Frieborn pack in New Mexico, including some captive-born animals that were successfully fostered into the pack from the Endangered Wolf Center in Missouri.
