Marauding Wolf Pack To Be Killed Agents To Destroy Adults, But Pups Moved To Central Idaho

Sun., June 8, 1997

Associated Press

Federal agents will kill the remaining adults in a Montana wolf pack next week because they have returned to killing cattle, but the pack’s pups will be moved to central Idaho.

“Wolves get two chances to depredate on livestock and after that they are destroyed,” said Carter Niemeyer, an Agriculture Department wolf management specialist.

Hands at the Castle Mountain Ranch in western Montana discovered two dead calves last week. The carcasses were less than a mile from where wolves from the Boulder pack were believed to have killed seven calves in January.

After biologists confirmed that wolves killed the calves, they trapped and collared the nursing alpha female they believed responsible, then released her to follow her to her den.

Niemeyer said the female, still wearing the radio collar put on her before relocation from Canada, probably attacked the calves in the absence of deer and elk.

Biologists hope to capture her pups alive and ship them to a one-acre holding pen in Idaho, where they will be released with other wolves as part of an experimental population in the central wilderness.

An Idaho pair will socialize the litter to hunt natural game, breaking the beef-eating pattern that doomed the pups’ home pack, said Ed Bangs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Niemeyer said the remaining wolves will be euthanized, although he did not know exactly how many that would be. Bangs speculated that four or five pack mates remained after officials killed four in January.

They will likely wait to see if the female joins up with any unknown pack mates before destroying her.

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