Producers, Environmentalists And Others Join Forces

It’s fashionable these days for Westerners of many political stripes to endorse “sustainability” and “consensus-building” in blazing the trail toward solution of the West’s environmental concerns. Unfortunately the fashion typically includes lots of theoretical talk and few, if any, examples of real-world success.

One such example, however, is Predator Friendly Inc., a coalition of sheep producers, environmentalists, scientists, and entrepreneurs attempting to open markets for wool products produced without killing predators.

Predator control is an important issue for ranchers. In Montana in 1995, ranchers lost about $2 million of sheep and lambs and almost $1 million of cattle to predators, according to the state agricultural statistics service. Meanwhile, the federal Animal Damage Control program (ADC) spent over $1.5 million that year to control predators (primarily coyotes and foxes) in the state, according to the Predator Project.

Though the economic losses are real and the threat they pose to a ranch’s finances is substantial, there are other losses as well. Predation is ugly. Ranchers often (and justifiably) feel personally diminished and vengeful upon seeing the gutted carcass of a sheep they’d watched from infancy, perhaps even helped birth.

On the other hand, predation is also part of the natural cycle, and wanton killing of predators infuriates wildlife advocates. When the killing is done by the ADC on public lands (which are often leased to sheep growers), it is condemned as using public money to kill publicly owned wildlife for the benefit of private interests.

Predator Friendly’s consensus-building approach has shunned the rhetoric involved in this debate. Instead, sheep producers and environmentalists have come together to find a mutually beneficial solution.

The concept is fairly simple: Once a ranch is certified as using non-lethal methods to control predators, it can sell its wool at a rate that’s currently about twice the commodity price. The wool is made into clothing, blankets and hats that sell in specialty stores and catalogs throughout the country.

What may be most exciting about Predator Friendly is that this relatively simple solution also carries significance in several other current cultural and public policy debates.

First, the solution uses market forces instead of coercion. No law or agency is demanding that sheep producers change their practices. They do so voluntarily - because they can make more money.

The initiative is a triumph of low technology. Traditionally, ranchers have called in the ADC to kill predators using traps and sometimes helicopter-borne hunters. Ranchers enrolled in Predator Friendly, however, typically use guard dogs, donkeys, and llamas, in addition to fences, to keep away or harass predators.

When this works, it means that compared to the ADC, Predator Friendly’s formula increases - all at the same time - personal freedoms and responsibilities, protection of natural resources, and efficiency.

Also, by increasing the income of enrolled ranchers, Predator Friendly improves the viability of these often family owned operations. Higher revenues are desperately needed in the sheep industry, which has struggled recently with increased foreign competition and reduced government subsidies.

By helping ranches stay in production, Predator Friendly preserves open space. Environmentalists are concerned that subdivision of private lands could be as damaging to wildlife habitat as any policies on public lands, and are thus eager for ranches to remain viable.

Finally, the effort also works to expand the “green market,” in which consumers concerned about the environment can contribute directly to its protection. One argument against environmental regulations has been that they can force a small segment of the population (often ranchers, loggers, or other rural residents) to pay for the wishes of the (often urban) majority.

That approach is sometimes the only feasible one, and thus worthwhile. But where practicable, the green-market approach is preferable because it allows consumers to put their dollars where their ideologies are. It is not easy. It relies on you as a consumer volunteering to spend extra money for a Predator Friendly product, even when you could spend that money on a ski vacation instead. But it is fair.

Predator Friendly is by no means widely accepted. Some analysts are uneasy about the costs of certification, about the strength of demand in the green market, or about its implication that environmental protection is a luxury good. Some sheep producers have criticized the program as playing on emotions, implicitly condemning non-enrolled ranchers and vastly oversimplifying issues of predator control.

But ranchers involved in Predator Friendly have a different take. “In a difficult business like this, we need to try new things,” says Dude Tyler, a second-generation sheep rancher who helped start the effort. “To gain control over both our profits and lifestyles, ranchers need to become more than producers of commodities. We need to see a bigger picture.”

And others involved see cultural goals for the West. This is a hallmark story for efforts at consensus-building and sustainability: if predator advocates and sheepmen can get together to create real-world solutions that help both parties, then surely anybody can.

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