The last so-called wild wolf was hunted down in 1924. It was not until 2011 that another padded across the border into Oregon.
Today, the gray wolves have gained a big position in the Golden State. This year the state is home to nine packs containing an estimated 70 wolves, up from 44 last year.
There are most them in northeastern of the state; however, one pack is located around 200 miles north of Los Angeles.
State wildlife staff estimate that at least 30 pups were born this year, and others expect additional packs in the following years.
While some experts are claiming it is a victory for the natural world, many ranchers are not very pleased with the comeback of a species, which their great-grandfathers helped drive to near extinction.
The Endangered Species Act enabled the wolves to return. Wolves were distributed throughout the whole area of North America.
“Wolves were one of the most common and widely distributed carnivores,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the Gray Wolf coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
It is estimated that there were anything from 250 000 to 2 000 000 of the canines before the advent of western influence in the region.
Concerns arise as farmers and ranchers settled and started engaging in activities that affected their livestock and safety. Most states promised rewards for the destruction of these animals.
In 1915 Congress passed a law that called for the removal of this predator from all federal lands. Between that and habitat loss, the number of wolves decreased significantly.
This was the last time the wolf was sighted and killed in California; the last known wolf was shot in Lassen County in the north of the state in 1924.
Some people think that as early as 1930 all wolves throughout the Lower 48 had been eradicated save for one small population in northern Minnesota.
This was, however, to change in 1974 when Nixon’s administration listed the wolf under the Endangered Species Act. “It was no longer legal to kill wolves in the Lower 48,” said Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity in Arizona.
Those were the signals that the wolves required to start recovering the area that has been their traditional hunting ground. Wolves began moving out from Minnesota and Canada.
Small groups of wolves were also reintroduced from Canada: Others said it will take 31 to Yellowstone National Park and 35 to central Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, she said.
From there wolves began a slow but steady migration from Idaho to Oregon and then southward, Hunnicutt said.
“We didn’t reintroduce wolves into California,” he said. “They came on their own.”
The first wolf in California: OR7
The first wolf that was documented to have crossed into California came from Oregon in December 2011 according to Hunnicutt.
The male wolf, named OR7 because he was the seventh wolf to be fitted with a radio collar in Oregon, was an overnight sensation. An animated children’s storybook, a documentary and a number of books were produced next.
In the next 13 years the population went up and wolves as animals hunted, mated, gave birth to their young and formed wolf families.
“If you remove the human factor from the issue, the system returns to being a natural one,” he said.
Currently wolves are occupying many areas all over the state. There are nine packs, eight in the northern part of the state and one, the Yowlumni pack, in southern Tulare County less than 200 air miles from Los Angeles.
“That was a shock,” Hunnicutt said. ‘Not a soul would have said, ‘Yeah, they are going to jump 500 miles south. But they did.”
Another type of game is also coming nearer to the population – wolves. Instead, he said: “We have detection of wolves 10 to 15 miles outside of Reno.”
Wolves remain controversial
As with other species of large carnivores, the reappearance of the wolf in California, as well as throughout the United States, has raised controversy.
Wildlife organisations and activists are delighted to see them return while many cattlemen, stockmen and hunters claim that wolves are killing their cattle and elk or deer.
The study conducted at the University of California, Davis suggests that cattle form a large contingent of their diet. According to a 2022 analysis of wolf feces, 86 percent of the samples were positive for cow.
Of 401 samples taken in the same year, the authors reported 57 percent contained cow, according to Tina Saitone, a professor of cooperative extension in livestock and ranchland economics.
It’s only natural. Wolves are smart animals, stated Hunnicutt. >This is the mentality if someone were to say to you that you have a knife and your next meal is what you kill, would you go hunting an elk which weighs as much as 800pounds or would you approach one of these slow moving cows?
Stress may be a factor, however, in areas where wolves are present, the calves do not gain as much weight and cows have fewer births according to UC Davis’ findings.
She said: ‘This means that there are direct and indirect effects of coexistence with wolves that the ranchers are feeling’.
Wolves are provocative, especially where people from the Anglo-Saxon countries are concerned, ‘because they kill livestock and hunt’.
Efforts to delist the animals for the federal endangered species list have been made several times since 2008, with different administrations trying to argue that the country’s wolf population has grown strong enough.
Conservation groups then go to court with an argument that they have only managed to find a small proportion of their former habitat. The protections have been put in place and then removed several times.
For the moment, three states, namely Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, permit at least some wolf hunting.
Wolves are still protected in California and they are still expanding their range.
That has led to more instances of wolves preying on livestock and a rising awareness that wolves have a price tag.
“The overwhelming majority of Californians will never meet a wolf in person or hear its howl,” Hunnicutt continued, explaining wolves are not aggressive and avoid people.
It seems to be the cattle ranchers in northeastern California who do, by and large. “They wake up to wolves, they see wolves, they have to live with the price for the wolves eating their stock.”
Support for rancher but less than before
Since wolf creates pressure on ranchers and cattlemen within the state of California, the state initiated compensation program and proffered strategies that would remove the incentive in wolves that go for the attack of the calves and cows.
The Wolf-Livestock Compensation program, it provides cash incentives that compensate confirmed wolf kills of livestock.
On the issue of depredations the evidence confirms that the majority of losses are of beef cattle. And a couple of sheep at and least one llama,” said Kirk Wilbur, vice president of government affairs with the California Cattlemen’s Association.
There was also support for ranchers to paint flags along fences to discourage wolves and support for funding for monitoring cattle, usually on horses. “We rear cattle for consumption by humans not wolves,” he said. Ranchers and wolves can co-exist but “but it costs money.”
In 2021, the state allocated $3 million to the cause, the most ambitious wolf management strategy in the United States. But the money ran out in May.
While the state is in a middle of a budget deficit, this year the state has allocated $600,000. “Well, that’s kind of the problem,” Wilbur replied, “That doesn’t go real far.”
It will be a transition period for both human beings and wildlife since the wolves will be returning after a century, according to Hunnicutt.
Wild carnivores are shifting balance of carnivores in the state, he said. ‘We would anticipate that coyote and mountain lion numbers will decline and then deer, elk and bears will follow,’
However, the land they are moving into is not as before that in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I remember him saying, ‘In 1924 there were only three million people in California.’ The state’s population today is 39 million.
‘Everything has changed,’ said UC Davis’ Saitone. As a population, we have distorted so many things, prey, predator, urbanization. There are so many things even if we cannot solve them.”
