Abstract
Wolf control to reduce cattle depredation is an important issue to ecology and agriculture in the United States. Two recent papers use the same dataset having wolf population characteristics and cattle depredation, but come to opposing conclusions concerning the link between wolf control and cattle depredation. Our paper aims to resolve this issue by using the same dataset and developing a model based on a causal association that would explain the nature of the relationship between wolf control and cattle depredation. We use the data on wolf population, number of cattle, number of wolves killed and number of cattle killed, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Interagency Annual Wolf Reports over the period of 1987–2012. We find a positive link between wolf control and cattle depredation. However, it would be incorrect to infer that wolf control has a positive effect on the number of cattle depredated. We maintain that this link comes from a growing wolf population, which increases cattle depredation, and in turn, causes an increase in the number of wolves killed. While the wolf population is growing, we see both wolf removal and cattle depredation simultaneously grow. It is not until the wolf population growth nears the steady state, that removal of wolves has a sufficient negative effect to reduce or stabilize the number of cattle depredated.
Highlights
The issue of wolf control to reduce livestock depredation has an important place in agricultural and ecological literature
Neither of the papers account for the nonlinear pattern in wolf population growth, cattle depredations and the number of wolves killed over time
These graphs clearly show a sigmoidal nonlinear growth, which is consistent with a series of linked predator-prey models: cattle depredations increase with increasing wolf population, which in turn increases the predation of wolves by humans
Summary
The issue of wolf control to reduce livestock depredation has an important place in agricultural and ecological literature. Removing wolves is generally thought to help ranchers reduce their livestock losses through a reduction in the wolf-cattle interactions. Two recent papers (Wielgus and Peebles [1], and Poudyal et al [2]) use the same dataset to draw opposing conclusions about the effect of wolf control on cattle depredation. Our paper focuses on solving the same problem, and attempts to determine the true relationship between wolf control and cattle depredation. Wolf control and its consequences are an important issue in the western United States. In reaction to depredations on livestock and wildlife, gray wolves (Canis lupus) were essentially extirpated from the western U.S by the 1930s. In 1973, the gray wolf was given protection under the Endangered Species Act, which laid the ground work for the required recovery
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