Oregon’s Rotting Cattle Carcasses Lead to Dead Wolves
By Amaroq Weiss
Leaving toxic household cleaners where toddlers can reach the brightly colored bottles is a foolproof way to land children in the hospital. What’s just as predictable is that when ranchers leave dead cattle and sheep on the landscape, the carcasses attract wolves looking for a free lunch.
All too often those same wolves, drawn in by the livestock industry’s poor management practices, shift their focus to live animals grazing nearby. When this happens, the results are also sadly predictable. Wolves are shot and killed for eating livestock they were lured to in the first place.
This heartbreaking cycle is common in parts of rural Oregon, where livestock carcasses and bone piles are frequently left to bake in the sun. It’s also preventable — but only if the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife admits the problem and refuses to kill wolves lured in by dead livestock.
Biologists, wildlife agency staff and livestock owners have long known that carcasses and bone piles attract wolves and other predators and should be removed or buried to prevent conflicts. Yet in Baker County the cycle goes on.
A lone radio-collared male wolf has been drawn to ranching operations near the Baker City Municipal Airport, where livestock owners have left two cattle carcasses outside to rot. Despite media coverage in mid-March, the carcasses remained — so the wolf was still in the area, feeding on them.
A Department of Fish and Wildlife district wildlife biologist is quoted in this recent coverage saying that the wolf, drawn in by these carcasses, could now become interested in and attack nearby live domestic animals.
In the 24 years since wolves began returning to Oregon, their population has grown to 175 at the most recent count. Many wolves established packs with territories in northeastern Oregon, including Baker County. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the area, especially livestock producers, who doesn’t know wolves have returned to their natural environment.
Knowing there are wolves and grazing livestock on the same terrain means the outcome of shoddy carcass-management practices is entirely foreseeable. There’s no justification for not removing dead livestock and bone piles. Livestock owners can bury the carcasses, treat them with lime, or post fencing or fladry to ward off wolves and other predators.
In this specific case, the lone wolf who’s been drawn in is a member of the Lookout Mountain pack. In 2021 the pack was reduced from a thriving 11-member family to only three after state wildlife officials killed the breeding male, two yearlings, and five of the seven young pups born that year because of livestock conflict.
In a cascading tragedy, the following year the surviving wolf mother managed to find a new mate and produce a small litter, only to be killed illegally that fall.
The lone wolf now feeding on carcasses in Baker County is the sole survivor of the Lookout Mountain wolf family’s 2021 litter. He’s less than two years old and hasn’t had previous trouble with livestock. If he starts to prey on nearby live cattle, it’s because he was baited by livestock carcasses.
That’s why several conservation groups recently sent a letter to the Department of Fish and Wildlife notifying officials that what’s happening in Baker County is placing this wolf’s life at risk. Livestock owners must act responsibly and clean up carcasses and bone piles, even as the state continues to work toward building a carcass-composting operation near the town of Baker this year. The state should develop these facilities across eastern Oregon.
A colorful bottle of bleach is sitting right out there on the playroom floor. Will we choose to pick it up in time?
Amaroq Weiss, a biologist and former attorney, is senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.
