November 3, 2011 in Outdoors, City

State’s wolf plan meeting today

Fish and Wildlife panel to hear presentations

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Associated Press photo

Gray wolves have established at least five breeding packs in Washington since 2008.
(Full-size photo)

As Washington Fish and Wildlife officials are slashing budgets for existing programs, they’re meeting in Spokane today to deal with yet another new challenge – wolves.

The state Fish and Wildlife Commission will hear presentations on the proposed Wolf Conservation and Management Plan starting at 9 a.m. at the Ramada Spokane Airport, 8909 W. Airport Drive.

The gray wolf, considered an endangered species in Washington, is infiltrating from Idaho and Canada and has established at least five breeding packs since 2008.

Last week, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced that Fish and Wildlife Department officials would have to make another round of deep budget cuts.

Her suggestions included suspending compensation to farmers and ranchers for wildlife damage to their livestock and crops such as those caused by elk eating hay and bears shredding trees on private timberlands.

Compensation for livestock that are expected to be killed by wolves is a key issue in gaining the acceptance of farmers and ranchers for the wolf management plan, said Phil Anderson, Fish and Wildlife Department director.

“We have about $25,000 in hand for livestock depredation associated with wolves,” he said, noting the money came from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Defenders of Wildlife, an animal advocacy group.

No steady state funding source has been secured.

Anderson plans to pursue additional funds from the federal government and ask the Legislature to give the agency access to funds generated by sales of personalized vehicle license plates featuring the orca.

“Our agency has lost about 40 percent of our general fund money in the past three years, and we’re being asked to cut another 10 percent – that’s $6.9 million,” Anderson said.

The cuts likely will include more staff positions and the $300,000 the agency allocates every two years to compensating farmers and ranchers for wildlife damage to their crops, he said.

Meanwhile in Spokane, public comment on the proposed wolf management plan will be taken today during the Fish and Wildlife Commission’s afternoon session.

This is the last of four public meetings on the wolf plan, which has been two years in the making. The panel is scheduled to take final action on the plan in December.

The most controversial element of the plan hinges around the number of wolf packs that would be allowed before the state begins controlling the growth of the population.

The plan currently calls for 15 breeding pairs, but livestock and sportsmen’s groups are calling for wolf control to be triggered at a lower number of packs.

In 2004, when Montana had about 15 breeding wolf pairs, the state’s ranchers were paid $54,757 in wolf depredation compensation. Montana reported wolf management and monitoring costs exceeded $900,000 that year.

Five comments on this story so far. Add yours!

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  Freedom1080 on November 03 at 4:08 p.m.

  Hard to believe with the disaster cause by wolves in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming that any Game Departemnt would support wolves. I guess if they hate their jobs and are not smart enough to understand hunters support their paycheck wolves are great. I mean what did Idaho lose in Non resident sales last year 7 Million dollars. How many Green Suburas granola cruchers came to the state to see wolves. No clue there was so few they didn’t even show up on the radar. So if you hate wildlife, if you hate ranchers, if you are a Michael Vick wannabe and want to see dogs ripped to shreds wolves are great.

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  Ready5 on November 03 at 4:36 p.m.

  I do believe that the best course of action with WDFW is to have them defunded. They are just so quick to want more money even before the last wolf meeting hasn’t started. If they are gonna get money for the wolf plan going through then we should do what we can to destroy their financial gain. Or could it be that the outcome of this wolf plan was set in stone well before they even picked the wolf working group and just playing like they followed protocol?
  Just watch the video footage of prior meetings where it is established that the ranching and sportsmens interests are put as the minority in the group. If it was about reaching agreements the appearance of a balanced discussion should have been at least a 50/50 split in the philosophies of the two sides.
  I just hope that the pro-wolf groups can seem as excited about the wolves when they reach the outskirts of the Seattle Metro area and wreak havoc on the neighborhoods. I do not wish this on the livestock and pets that are in harms way but it will be a result of people not looking at Idaho and Montana with clear vision and instead listening to the feel good stories of the wolf cult.
  I’m sure they Wolf Haven crowd will jump all over any negative wolf comments here but think about it for a moment. The WDFW and it’s partners in the pro wolf cult mandate that the population must be spread across the entire state before any population control can be enacted what happens to those animals that are in the way of this death march by those wolves? Oh but then again WDFW does give the option for trans location of the wolf to help it reach more areas. Or was that already a WDFW policy that never reached the books in Olympia?

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  nowolves on November 04 at 2:17 p.m.

  These plans can be somewhat of a joke. Oregons Wolf Conservation and Management Plan has a section called “Existence Value” under “Economic considerations”. It talks about the warm and fuzzy feeling people get knowing the wolves are on the landscape…… The question they need to ask is why the other side of the coin (what the rancher is feeling knowing wolves are in his area) is not presented??? Read the plan …. page 93. It is worse than the Montana plan written years ago! Wyoming has the right management plan for this animal. It will never live well around humans…..

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  notrich on March 01 at 6:57 a.m.

  today’s news in the “Missoulian” tells that the population of wolves in montana has increased 15% despite 75% of the wolf hunting quota was reached. This tells me two things; no one likes to hunt wolves (not enough killed) and everyone would rather hunt deer and elk. the article goes on to say that Idaho’s out of state hunter numbers dropped and the state lost a lot of money because of it.
  Well, duh!, if there’s no elk/deer to hunt why come to idaho?
  i’m not against wolves–i’m against people that re-introduce animals such as wolves and mountain caribou without any legal means to control their population or without looking at the effects that animal will have on the environment.
  If the number of deer and elk in an area is too high…they will eat the foliage and starve. so my opinion holds true for deer and elk as well as wolves and caribou.
  I’ve heard from a local about a guy that was attacked by a wolf pack, shot/killed one with his rifle, loaded again, shot at a second/missed, loaded again, shot point blank at a third/ruffled some fur, and the wolves brushed his legs as they went by. do you think he had a little “accident”? he reported the incident to fish and game; who replied, “we didn’t see/talk with you.”
  Four conclusions possible: they were too lazy to deal with it, they didn’t want to admit that wolves attack people, they didn’t want to spend the money or time to deal with it, or their superiors had told them to ignore these types of reports.
  You draw your own conclusions.
  In talking with a local trapper, he relayed that there are seven packs in the region and that the pack hanging around Murray, idaho has seven members. It will be interesting to see the population changes in the region with the hunting and trapping.

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  SpokanNdn on April 16 at 9:01 a.m.

  Washington State is importing wolves at an alarming rate. They have released several packs just north of our border with stevens county. Those wolves have homesteaded our remote areas of the reservation, devouring our deer and elk populations. For many years the State of Washington has tried without success to desimate our elk herds, by offering either sex elk hunts for archery, muzzle loader, and modern rifle hunts just north of us. Now the State is going to spike only in the Huckleberry Mountain range. They have succeeded in thier task, taking food out of the mouth on my tribe! We will start killing every wolf we see, and State game wardens be warned, this is a soveriegn nation! And we will take care of your problems that tresspass on our land! I promise you!