Posted on 02/24/2008 10:18:19 PM PST by george76
The Popo Agie Ranch, just four miles south of town, has a 70-acre hay meadow which rises from an aspen- and cottonwood-sheltered river basin, rolling east and empty into the foot of Table Mountain.
The meadow, and the adjacent 4,000-acre pasture, was once used for a modest but profitable cow-calf operation.
Today, if visitors roll over the wooden platform bridge across the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River, they'll notice a few corralled llamas, a handful of horses, but no cows.
When wolves moved into the area, rancher Dave Vaughan got out of the cow-calf business...
"As soon as we lost those calves, I said, 'I'm not going to do this anymore,"'
Wolves were confirmed on Vaughan's ranch in January 2003 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but he's pretty sure they arrived in 2002.
That's when he saw his calf survival rate take a sudden dip...
Vaughan welcomes last week's announcement that wolves will be removed from federal Endangered Species Act protection soon.
"I'm not against wolves, but I'm against too many wolves. And we've got to manage the wolf population just like we do the elk population, the deer population, the antelope population," he said. "And I think that's why the good Lord put us here on this earth, because we're smart and we need to manage what we have."
"We don't want to eliminate them, we just want to be able to shoot them if they come on and threaten our livelihood. And that's where we're at now. I think the delisting is a good thing both for the wolves and for the people."
(Excerpt) Read more at jacksonholestartrib.com ...
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federal Endangered Species Act
My good buddy has a cow calf operation starting up. We don’t have wolves, but we’ve got coyotes. The cows can normally defend against them, but one cow who had a calf was without the calf the next day, and we thought the coyotes got it. But then, five days later, she had the calf with her. She had just taken it to some isolated spot and told it to hide, however it is that cows do that... :)
It was a good feeling to know that the calf had made it. I suppose for a big operation you don’t get attached to the calfs, but ours all have names. :)
Thanks for the ping.
As you mentioned previously, the Canadian wolves introduced into the area weigh 120+ lbs. The native wolves that once roamed Idaho and Montana weighed 45-60 lbs.
if cougars, bears and wolves were shot at or the dogs let to chase them, they would soon learn to stay in the woods, away from humans, and then wouldn't everybody all around be happier...
There are no "native wolves." They came over the land bridge with "native Americans" and bison from Asia. They are an anthropogenic introduced species, no matter how long they've been here.
I'd love to see a case on that, because I'd bet the definition of "introduced" is broad enough to place wolves under that distinction.
Four days ago my sister saw four wolves feeding on a deer or elk carcass on my tree farm. They’re here in North Idaho for sure...
The minor flaw in your argument is that you assume that the environmentalists believe that WE are a legitimate part of the ecosystem!
?
It was a good feeling to know that the calf had made it. I suppose for a big operation you don’t get attached to the calfs, but ours all have names
Must be those special talking cows.
I used to name the calves dropped when I was growing up on the farm.
The heifers were named "More Work" and all the bull calves were named "Hamburger".
Wolves kill dogs because they consider them competition, just as they kill Coyotes. Even big dogs can’t run with the wolf pack.
Yes, wolf subspecies vary quite a bit in size. What they introduced to Yellowstone is the Mackenzie Valley Wolf (Canis lupus occidentalis). I’ve noticed some web sites have started calling this wolf the “Rockey Mountain” wolf. What used to be there was Canis lupus nubilus, a much smaller wolf.
You’re mistaken. Wolves were here before humans (La Brea Tar Pits confirms that). What came over in the Pleistocene with the Native Americans were dogs (a different subspecies of wolves).
[make them part of the entire ecosystem, in which case, a human could shoot and kill them if they needed too...]
And wolves on rangeland need to be shot.
Those were dire wolves, which are now extinct. The Gray Wolf came from Asia.
There are both Dire wolves and Gray wolves in the pits. Gray wolves apparently do come from Asia (after their ancestors migrated from America to Asia) but they came without humans and about 3 or 400,000 ya. This is an impossible date for travel with NA’s.
I don't know about that, if I were a wolf after reading about the delisting i think I'd probably say "Uh oh...".........
As I understand it the jury is still out on that one. The clovis guy for sure.
I'm going on what I was told by a reputable source in Alaska about recent (as in, they may not even be published yet) pollen strata studies from the Bering Strait related to the migrations of herbivores across the land bridge. Apparently there was insufficient forage for them to have wandered across; they had to have been driven. The working hypothesis is that gray wolves followed the herds.
Yup.
From Wikipedia (because I don't have time for this):
Current theories propose that the gray wolf first evolved in Eurasia during the early Pleistocene. The rate of changes observed in DNA sequence date the South-East Asiatic lineage to about 800,000 years, as opposed to the American and European lineages which stretch back only 150,000.[46] The gray wolf then migrated into North America from the Old World, probably via the Bering land bridge (that once joined Alaska and Siberia), around 400,000 years ago. The gray wolf then coexisted with the Dire Wolf (Canis dirus), a Canid species that was larger and heavier than the gray wolf and appeared in South America over 700,000 years ago and whose origin is still speculated.
"Genetic (mitochondrial DNA) testing being performed at the University of South Carolina, College of Science and Mathematics, indicates that these dogs, related to the earliest domesticated dogs, are the remnant descendants of the feral pariah canids who came across the Bering land mass 8,000 to 11,000 years ago as hunting companions to the ancestors of the Native Americans.
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