It’s an old story that is again beginning to play out with a new chapter in Saskatchewan.
The story is about predatory animals and farmers. The two simply have never gotten along.
Predators are generally smart, at least among animals. They have to be to survive by tracking prey. And that inherent ability has meant predators such as cougars and wolves and even smaller ones such as foxes and coyotes, come rather quickly to realize that domestic livestock is easy to catch, and that makes farms pretty much a corner diner for lunch.
This is not new. It’s a situation which has led to many predatory species being eradicated completely from huge areas. Wolves, for example, were hunted to extinction in Britain by sometime in the 1800s, but the year’s a bit fuzzy based on reported single sightings apparently.
Thankfully here in Canada we never got to the point of hunting our predators to extinction, although foxes and coyotes still harry farmyard chickens on occasion. That is less of an issue as few farmers keep a flock for their own eggs these days.
Wolves, however, can still pose a problem.
They have always been the biggest problem in terms of wild animals and farming, or at least it seems that way.
When wolves kill a calf or an ewe, the results are obvious, the loss immediate and quite quantifiable.
One suspects the loss to deer eating crops in summer and hay stored in winter actually cause a higher loss in terms of real cash value. Far more deer are hit and killed on highways than wolves, and such accidents have a cost in terms of vehicle damage too.
And let’s not forget the damage from migratory waterfowl as they eat themselves fat on the farmers’ grain as they head south for the winter.
But in Canada at least, and on the Prairies in particular, deer and geese have far better public relations going for them, as they are something we have traditionally hunted for food. Hunting is still very much a part of our culture, not to the extent it was even a quarter of a century ago, but still practised by many.
Those many hunters also spend considerable dollars in the pursuit and those dollars ripple through the economy. That is a factor in the good PR of hunt species too.
So the recent announcement that the Ministry of Environment is again offering a wolf-hunting season for wildlife management zones along the provincial forest fringe as a method for helping to reduce wolf-livestock conflicts hasn’t caused much of a ripple here.
Such an announcement would have caused at least some uproar from groups such as the Sierra Club, because the wolf is among the more notable species to be pushed to the brink of extinction and beyond across most of North America.
It is a near testament to wolf management here that their population is such that they have again become a problem in some areas.
“Livestock predation by wolves is an ongoing problem for producers in areas near the provincial forest,” Environment Minister Scott Moe said in the release regarding the hunt. “Allowing a hunting season in these areas will remove some wolves and cause others to be more wary of moving into open areas where livestock are present.”
The situation is as old as man domesticating the first goat or sheep I’m sure, but at least here we still have a wolf population to find balance with, which is ultimately a good thing in my books.
