America has predators. Real predators.
Mostly, they’re not a big deal.
Yes, a local Maryland bear mauled a woman last fall, but that’s the risk you embrace when you run off-leash dogs in our mountains.
Yes, if you run free-range chickens and ducks and cannot be bothered building a tight coop, you will lose birds to fox, raccoons, and possums. Ditto with hawks if you fly pigeons. This not a secret, nor should it be a surprise. You assume the risk, and there should be no crying about the loss.
Coyotes can kill farm cats, sheep, goats, and small dogs if those animals are left out at night. This not a secret nor should it be a surprise.
Mountain lions prowl Boulder Colorado, and a few come in close to several western urban areas. If you’re a back country runner or bicyclist, this is a story you know, and the risk is assumed.
And then there’s western sheep, cattle, and goats run on mostly public land under long-term lease.
Grazing leases are controversial, as they lose the US Government money (over a billion dollars a year), same as timber leases.
The good news is that the western herding and ranch community has (mostly) figured out that bears, wolves and mountain lions have a well-funded and organized voting constituency.
On the other side of the coin, the charismatic mega-fauna green groups (mostly) recognize that at the state and local level, cattle and sheep are an economic engine and a major historical identity that will *not* be easily swept aside.
The result is that over the last 40 years or so, more and more effort has gone into management of *both* sheep and cattle and large predators in the American west, using a wide array of techniques, devices, and animals, from dogs, burros, and llamas to hot wires, shock and cyanide collars, electric lights, tracking collars, leghold traps, scarcrows, noise makers, and cyanide traps.
How’s it going?
Ups and downs; some pains and some gains.
On the upside, we now have more wolves, lions, bears, and coyotes in the US than we did 100 years ago.
Also on the upside, though there will *always* be livestock loss, a “middle ground” management now seems to be accepted. That middle ground management still allows for private gain (livestock profits) from public domain (BLM and NFS lands owned by all of America’s taxpayers), but it also recognizes that truly bad actor predators *will* be pruned out of the gene pool.
Or, as Captain Spock might have put it: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one or the few.”
This equation turns out to be true for both large predators *and* public lands livestock grazers.
To read a report from the front lines in western Wyoming by Cat Urbigkit, see >> https://www.rangewriting.com/post/uneasy-co-existence?
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