Free Republic

PRAY - For rancher Randy Petrich, the removal of gray wolves from the endangered-species list - a move that would open up the animals to hunting in the Northern Rockies for the first time in decades - couldn't come soon enough. Petrich has seen fresh wolf tracks almost every morning this fall - close enough to threaten his cattle. "I believe that any wolf on any given night, if there happens to be a calf there, they will kill it," ... Just 12 years since the wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park ... federal officials say the sharp rise...

The US Fish and Wildlife Service says a pack of endangered Mexican gray wolves has killed a horse belonging to a Catron County family. Mark Miller and his family returned to their homestead on the Diamond Creek in southwestern New Mexico about three weeks ago to find the remains of their horse. Tracks show the wolves apparently chased the horse from a pasture into a corral and killed it. Miller says his family has tried yelling at the wolves, throwing rocks and installing noisemakers, but he says the pack continues to be a problem.

Sheep don't mix well with grizzly bears and wolves. Now they won't mix at all on more than 70,000 acres in the Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness. A 74,000-acre sheep grazing allotment south of Big Timber in the Gallatin National Forest has been permanently closed and the ranchers who used it for generations have been paid to move their sheep elsewhere... The agreement is the eighth -- and second-largest -- in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem in recent years that has led to the retirement of about 300,000 acres from grazing. The latest involves the Ash Mountain and Iron Mountain allotments used for generations...

Wolves, wolf-hybrids suspected culprits in bloody predations... his herd of 700 sheep. But something had gotten there before him. Everywhere he looked, it seemed, there was a sheep that had been attacked and bloodied. "It was terrible," he said. "Some of them just had a chunk of flesh tore out, in some cases clear to the bone, the size of an orange. A few were bit in the neck." A few of the sheep could be doctored, but many of them died... of the 60 that were attacked, 21 died and 39 were injured. On top of that, the percentage...

Gnawing leisurely on the remains of a moose carcass, the wolf pack's alpha male seemed unaware that mortal danger was coming ever closer. Suddenly the eight-member rival pack burst into view. The alpha scrambled to his feet, but too late. Howling and barking, the enemy chased him down and mercilessly attacked, killing the hapless victim within a couple of minutes. It's not unusual for the gray wolves on Isle Royale National Park to target each other, said John Vucetich, a Michigan Tech University wildlife biologist who witnessed the carnage from an airplane in January. But the rival pack's brazen invasion...