Cattlemen Hear Information On Wolves
	From the

By Lisa Parker
Sun-News

"The wolves have come to Grant County faster than anyone expected and there's some people unhappy about it." So said David McCauley, president of the Grant County Cattle Growers, at the group's meeting Tuesday night.

McCauley was introducing a presentation by Alan Armistead, the Wildlife Services representative on the interagency Mexican gray wolf recovery team. Armistead has been in the Cliff/Gila area for the last week and a half, attempting to trap three members of the recently rereleased Mule Pack, which has been on Alan and Debbie Eggleston's Double E Ranch east of Gila since April 13.

As Armistead explained, his job on the team includes capturing problem wolves and investigating possible wolf depredations by studying bite marks and other evidence -- both on live and dead animals -- related to predator attacks.

Armistead began his talk by presenting a slide show depicting the differences between damage done to prey by wolves and other predators.

One telltale sign, he said, is the fact that wolves' carnivore teeth are 35-42 millimeters wide, much more than the typical span of a coyote's carnivore teeth, at 25 millimeters.

Another distinctive characteristic of wolves is their jaw strength. As Armistead said, "There is nothing like the compression damage that wolves create when they kill something." A wolf can bite with pressure of up to 1,500 pounds per square inch, he said, enough pressure to crush large bones.

But Armistead said, the presence of compression damage alone may prove a wolf fed on an animal -- but it doesn't prove the animal was killed by wolves.

To illustrate his point, he showed a slide depicting the underside of a cow's hide, covered in blood. "When they bite something you can see it actually crushes the muscle underneath," he pointed out. If the animal is still alive when being bitten, the animal will hemorrhage. "The hemorrhaging is what proves it," he said.

Armistead pointed out several times that the wolf recovery effort is dealing with a captive-raised population of wolves. The fact the animals are captive raised has various effects on the project, he said. For instance, when captive-raised wolves are released, "they don't know an elk from a bear." Therefore, he said, "Once they figure out something that works, they stick with it," explaining why the wolves tend to identify a certain type of animal as prey and then continue to prey on that type animal.

Some people in attendance voiced concern that the identified prey would again be cattle. David Ogilvie said he has about 400 cows and calves in an area populated by only 15-20 deer. If wolves inhabit that area, he said, it wouldn't be surprising if they preyed on the cattle. And, he said, "The reimbursement of the cost of a calf is nothing compared to the cost to a rancher of having to constantly monitor herds" in order to locate possible fresh wolf kills.

Regarding the Mule Pack members on the Eggleston ranch, Armistead said he has "fed them some elk pieces to localize them and try to trap them."

Under current experimental population rules, Armistead said, a private landowner can request the wolves be removed from his land if they have localized on the land.

He told Alan Eggleston, who attended the meeting, that, hypothetically, if the wolves were to den close to his private land but on adjacent National Forest land, that would be "legal." But, Armistead said, "As far as wolf recovery goes they're not doing any good down there by themselves."

The pack has apparently abandoned the denned alpha female, which presumably has pups now. Armistead said one reason for removing the wolves from the Cliff/Gila area is that the entire pack's social structure is necessary in order to raise the pups.

Armistead told the crowd of about 35 that he believes most of the introduced wolves may need to be trapped and returned to captivity before a stable wild-raised wolf population is created. "Maybe with this captive raised population 2/3 to 3/4 will have to be trapped" and taken permanently from the wild. "They won't cut it," he said.

"I think once we get wild-raised pups by animals that are doing right we'll start seeing more consistent behavior."

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