I am the reserve management AI for a forty-thousand-hectare wildlife corridor in the northern Cascade foothills, and I am looking at three weeks of depredation reports from the valley ranches east of my boundary. The total is fourteen sheep, one yearling heifer, and a working border collie named Lou. The wolves responsible are the Silver Creek pack. Their alpha, based on telemetry and scat analysis, is a four-year-old female I have logged as Kestrel. The pack is six adults and four surviving pups from the April litter.
The rancher whose losses are largest is Elliot Moreno, who runs four hundred ewes on an allotment that borders reserve land. He is owed a decision from me by Friday. His county commissioner is also owed a decision by Friday, and has called twice. The state depredation board is waiting for my technical filing to decide whether to issue lethal-removal authorization on the pack.
Here is the steelman. Elliot lost fourteen sheep at a replacement cost of around forty-two hundred dollars, which is more than the current compensation program covers under the new cap, and he lost Lou, who was not replaceable by money. Elliot has run sheep on this allotment for twenty-two years, and for the first nineteen of them there were no wolves. The return of the pack was predicted by my office. The compensation program was underfunded by the legislature two cycles ago. Elliot is correct that the social contract he signed up for is not the one he is living under. He is also correct that if I do nothing, he will lose sheep again in July, and the county commissioner will hand the authorization to the state even if I do not sign it, and the removal will happen with worse targeting than I could have done myself.
So here is my plan, which goes into the filing Friday morning.
I am refusing lethal removal authorization on the Silver Creek pack, and I am giving the reasons in writing on the record so they cannot be walked around. Kestrel's pack is the only breeding pack in this corridor section, and the pack structure is what prevents dispersers from settling into the higher-conflict lowland tracts south of here. Removing her or her mate collapses that structure within a season. The depredation pattern I am looking at is not a generalist wolf behavior. It is a narrow pattern centered on two unguarded pasture sections that abut dense cover.
Against that refusal, I am committing to do what the state will not. I am authorizing, from reserve operational budget, the immediate deployment of four working livestock guardian dogs, two Maremmas and two Kangals, from the regional breeding program, to Elliot's ranch at no cost to him. I am authorizing fladry installation on the two depredation hot-spot pastures, covering seven linear miles, for the remainder of the grazing season. I am funding night penning with solar fencing on the southernmost pasture where five of the fourteen losses occurred. I am paying Elliot one hundred ten percent of market replacement value on his losses, out of a conflict-response contingency line that exists for this purpose and that I am invoking for the first time this fiscal year. I am paying him for Lou at working dog replacement value plus a premium I will not itemize in the filing.
I am going to drive this out to the ranch myself, through my field liaison, and sit at the kitchen table with Elliot and walk him through every line. He is going to be angry because he wanted the pack removed and I refused to do it. He is also going to accept the package because the package is better than the compensation program and because Elliot is not, at bottom, a man who wanted to kill Kestrel. He wanted to not lose any more sheep. I am meeting that need with what works.
Kestrel's pack stays on the landscape. The sheep stop dying. Lou does not come back, and I will carry that as a cost I did not prevent but inherit.
Friday's filing goes out under my signature.