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Feds earmark funds for wildlife and rancher conflicts

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Write

The federal government announced it is earmarking $250,000 to help 16 ranchers in six Montana counties avoid problems with grizzly bears, wolves and eagles.


 "It's new this year," Erik Suffridge, a program specialist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Bozeman, said Wednesday.

The goal, he said, is to help ranchers and rare predators get along better.

"Maybe it will be a little easier for producers to live with these species," Suffridge said.

The program pays for electric fences to be erected around calving and lambing areas, helps pay the wages of herders and even pays ranchers to haul dead animals to a rendering facility, which often are located in distant cities.

Payments to individuals -- whom Suffridge said he could not name without a specific Freedom of Information Act request -- range from $1,500 to $40,000.

In all, the program will install more than seven miles of fence, hire herders to patrol more than 32,000 acres and dispose of hundreds of dead sheep and cows.

Ranchers will be paid $120 to haul one of their own dead cattle to a plant. The goal is to keep the carcasses from attracting predators to ranches. Ranch "boneyards" have often attracted scavenging bears and wolves in the the past.

The electric fences are meant to keep predators away from vulnerable baby animals, and herders can often chase away attacking carnivores.

The ranchers participating in the program live in Carbon, Sweetgrass, Beaverhead, Madison, Powell and Phillips Counties.

The program comes on top of a program by Defenders of Wildlife, a private environmental group that pays ranchers for livestock that is confirmed killed by wolves and grizzlies. Defenders also pays for electric fencing and other "non-lethal" measures.

Last year, Defenders wrote checks for $139,000 to compensate ranchers for 442 sheep, 110 cattle and six other animals killed by wolves, mostly in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

Predation on livestock has grown as wolf numbers have climbed since they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho 10 years ago.

Livestock losses to protected species "is rising as a central issue in Montana agriculture," said Dave White, NRCS state conservationist.

Scott McMillion is at scottm@dailychronicle.com

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