For the week of April 9 - 15, 2003

SNRA finds wolves are not impaired by grazing

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By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer

For 10 public lands livestock grazing allotments on the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, public lands officials have determined that cattle and sheep grazing do not impair Idaho’s reintroduced wolves.

What’s more, a U.S. District judge ruled this week that Wolves in Idaho’s SNRA will be protected for a second grazing season, even if the predators prey on livestock.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill on Wednesday also clarified the injunction sought by Western Watersheds Project and the Idaho Conservation League not only protects wolves on public property, but also on private land.

On June 11, 2002, Winmill also ordered the SNRA to begin analyzing whether livestock grazing is impairing wolves. In his finding, Winmill said the Forest Service had violated the law that created the SNRA, called the Organic Act, by failing to consider whether grazing is "substantially impairing" wolf populations.

SNRA officials released their first Organic Act analysis for gray wolves in conjunction with a draft environmental impact statement for grazing allotments in the East Fork of the Salmon River drainage.

In that document, the SNRA included Organic Act studies for nine cattle allotments and one sheep allotment.

Remaining allotments, including those on the west slope of the White Cloud Mountains where government crews have shot wolves in response to livestock depredations, are nearly all sheep grazing allotments, said SNRA Area Ranger Deb Cooper.

Despite repeated conflicts between wolves and livestock on the SNRA, Cooper said the issue of "substantial impairment" was determined as it relates to Idaho’s wolf population as a whole, not for local populations of wolves only.

"Once again the court perceives this as a limited remedy that will give the parties time to work out solutions while allowing grazing to continue," Winmill wrote this week.

In the past three years, at least 30 wolves have been killed or removed in and around the recreation area due to conflicts with livestock, the environmental groups said. About 4,470 sheep and 2,500 graze on 28 Forest Service allotments there.

 

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