ROBLIN, Man. — Gary Fletcher looks exactly how a cattleman should look.
With a greying mustache and the eyes of someone who has spent countless hours peering into the distance looking for cattle, Fletcher wore cowboy boots, spurs, chaps, a black hat and a scarf on a stormy afternoon in late May.
Fletcher, manager of a community pasture near Roblin, Man., chooses to dress in the customary cowboy gear, but he also carries a traditional tool for the job: a rifle.
The gun isn’t a decoration. He has used it more than 20 times to shoot wolves that attacked cattle in Manitoba’s Parkland region.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
Fletcher was a pasture manager near Ethelbert, Man., for 17 years before taking a position at the Roblin community pasture this year. Standing by a corral at the pasture, Fletcher said there’s been an upsurge in wolf attacks over the last five to 10 years near Manitoba’s Duck Mountain Provincial Park.
“There was the odd kill (17 years ago, but) it gradually started increasing…. This past season there were certain areas of the (Ethelbert) pasture where we were having one kill a week,” Fletcher said inside a shed next to the corral as hail hammered down on the metal roof.
“That’s a 350 to 400 pound calf on a weekly basis until we were able to target that one (wolf) and got him.”
However, the increase in wolf attacks isn’t limited to cattle ranches adjacent to Duck Mountain and Riding Mountain National Park. Wolves have also moved well outside their traditional range and now populate southern and western parts of Manitoba, Fletcher said.
“You talk to other (pasture) managers in different areas, like Spy Hill (at the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border) or Gardenton south of Winnipeg, areas where we’ve never seen wolves before, all of a sudden there are wolves everywhere.”
Fletcher estimated that he or employees had to kill about 100 troublesome wolves during his 17 years as pasture manager at Ethelbert.
Len Angus, who raises purebred Limousin cattle north of Roblin, has also witnessed the recent change in wolf behaviour.
Moose and elk have migrated out of Duck Mountain Provincial Park over the last decade, and the wolves followed their natural prey. They begin to target cattle once outside the park, Angus said.
“A wolf takes its lunch wherever it’s easiest. They’re finding out that cattle are easy,” said Angus, whose home is only 1.6 kilometres from the park boundary.
“Not just in Roblin. Anywhere you go in the province, people are having trouble with predators. And they’re having trouble with wolves, not just coyotes…. One guy down there on the edge of the park (Riding Mountain), three years ago, he lost 19 calves to wolves.”
Wolves have killed seven calves and attacked one cow on Angus’s ranch over the last couple of years.
Mark Angus, Len’s son, said the province does compensate ranchers for livestock predation, but it only covers a fraction of the financial loss.
For example, the loss can be substantial if wolves kill two purebred calves.
“(If) those two cows because of the stress (of predators) … come in void, then we’re out two calf crops,” Mark said.
“Say a low dollar value, $4,000 a calf, we’re out $16,000. How many businesses can cover $16,000 worth of loss?”
Angus said there’s an obvious solution to the problem: cull the wolf population outside of the parks.
“If they (the government) would pay a $400 bounty on wolves, we probably wouldn’t need to worry about them,” he said.
“It’s just an overpopulation of the wolves.”
There are other ways to prevent predators from attacking livestock, such as using dogs, donkeys or llamas to protect the herd. Those prevention strategies might work with coyotes but not with wolves, Angus said.
“A coyote and a wolf, they’re totally different animals,” he said.
“They talk about Great Pyrenees dogs, but (a neighbour) had two Great Pyrenees and the wolves killed them.”
Fletcher agreed that guard animals don’t always work with wolves.
“Around Valley River, closer to Dauphin, there was a farm that had two donkeys, three horses and a llama,” he said. “The wolves came in there and killed the llama and two donkeys.”
In 2011, the provincial government introduced an incentive program to reduce the wolf population in the Duck Mountain Provincial Park and other hunting areas in the region. The province offered $250 per trapped wolf because the moose population in the area was declining.
Angus said the program hasn’t been effective.
“It obviously hasn’t worked for us because everyone around the park is still having problems (with wolves).”
Angus said cattle producers and government wildlife experts recognize that a wolf cull is necessary, but policy makers are dancing around the obvious solution. Politicians know that placing a bounty on wolves is risky because the wolf is an iconic species.
“These answers you get from (the government), they’re all scripted,” Angus said.
“As long as man has been here … (we) have had to cull wolves. It’s no different today.”
