Wolf attacks, injures cow dog

A man and his dog are about as old a relationship as Adam and Eve -- so when rancher Gary Ely heard one of his cow dogs howling in pain, he prodded his horse into a gallop and hoped he was in time to help.

"I knew the wolves had come in on her. She had a big hole ripped in her left shoulder. I saw a big collared wolf. I shot my pistol up in the air. The wolf turned and left," he said, his voice hurried as he recalled the shocking encounter.

"He sure was a large male. There were four collared wolves in the area. I assume he was the dominant male."

The incident happened August 23 between 8 and 8:30 a.m. as Ely rode the Malay Gap area with three other horsemen and 12 more cow dogs, which are hound dogs trained to locate cattle hidden in the brush so the rancher can check their tag and general health.

Ely, whose 4 Drag Ranch is based on upper Eagle Creek in Greenlee County, northwest of Clifton, runs a herd of about 200 Hereford cattle on about 8,000 acres of public land in the Apache National Forest. He pays an annual fee to the Forest Service for the right to graze cattle on several pastures in his allotment. He said his group of horsemen and cow dogs had done everything possible to avoid the wolf encounter.

"We were out riding. We were close to the reservation fence. We had a guy from Wildlife Services monitoring the wolves with his radio. He told us where the wolves were. We went in a direction away from them. Next thing the wolves had changed direction," Ely said.

"My dogs are cow dogs. They're hound dogs. They had scented something. The dogs took off. My dogs started baying and that's when the wolves started howling. The next thing I know I could hear one of my young cow dogs crying in pain," he said.

Ely isn't certain the wolf pack was pursuing his cow dogs. But he is puzzled by their behavior because he said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents told him wolves won't attack dogs unless they come close to a denning area.

There was no den in the area. The four collared wolves were in their hunting range.

"Me, JR and Alan Armistead found a big elk in the area. The wolves were eating on it. We saw a coyote walk within a few feet of the kill and the wolves didn't bother him. We were a good quarter mile away (from the pack)," he said.

The incident has Ely spooked about future use of his cow dogs to track his widespread cows.

"I'm at the point now I can't afford to take my dogs anywhere," he said, making clear he was worried about future wolf-dog conflicts.

One option the USFWS offered Ely was a hand-held tracking antenna so he could get a directional fix on the radio collars of nearby wolves and be able to head away from them.

At present, Ely relies on a federal or state wildlife person to alert him by walkie-talkie. He said he has turned down the offer of an antenna -- for fear of losing his grazing permit.

"I was told by Paul Ovarie of Arizona Game and Fish if I was given a tracking radio and an animal (wolf) turned up dead, I'd be liable. I could be considered the prime suspect," he said.

Ely says ranchers running cattle on federal land under a paid grazing permit are the least likely culprits whenever a wolf turns up dead or shot.

"My risk for killing a wolf is I would lose my ranch and my permit. The ranchers will be the least likely suspect," he said.

Besides roaming collared wolves that sometimes attack ranch cow dogs, Ely said another problem on the federal range is uncollared wolves -- which USFWS Wolf Program Manager Brian Kelly has vowed his agency would capture and collar.

Ely says the agency isn't doing a very good job of capturing uncollared wolves.

"For 14 months now they've denied us the right to trap uncollared wolves. Alan Armistead (of Wildlife Services) can't trap because they're afraid he'll trap collared wolves," he said, his voice heavy with frustration.

Ely, his wife Darcy, their son and daughter, and their two ranch cowboys are all that's available to roam 8,000 acres in search of cattle that, hopefully, will produce calves that can be sent to market in the fall, with the adults surviving to the following breeding season.

Last year, in 2001, Ely lost 40 calves and two cows to wildlife attacks, mostly from mountain lions. One calf kill was linked to a wolf and he received $1,000 for it from the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife. But the way Ely sees it, his herd is an open larder for the wolves.

"We're feeding the wolves. We've seen plenty of scat with black cow hair in it," he said, adding that when he's shown the scat, or dung, to Kelly, it was dismissed as the result of wolves scavenging on already dead cows.

That chicken-and-egg argument -- do wolves kill cattle regularly or do they steal the kills of other predators, like lions, and force those predators to kill more cattle -- is at the heart of a growing frustration in the cattle country of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.

That frustration has led the Arizona Cattle Growers Association to file several court cases in federal court that challenge endangered species rules and the effects the rules have on grazing permittees.

ACGA President Jeff Menges, who runs cattle on public land in Graham and Greenlee counties, vowed at the Aug. 24 meeting of the Greenlee Cattle Growers Association the state group would keep on fighting the legal battle in court.

Meanwhile, a man and his dog still roam the forest pastures, looking for a lost cow and her calf.

Copyright 2002, East Arizona Courier.

http://www.eacourier.com/articles/2002/09/04/news/export12362.txt

http://timberwolfinformation.org/info/archieve/newspapers/viewnews.cfm?ID=227

Much more reading:

http://timberwolfinformation.org/info/archieve/newspapers/viewnews.cfm?Area=9