Brian Bean remembers what it was like when wolves first attacked his livestock in 2002, just seven years after the once-exterminated predators were reintroduced to the United States. “It was pretty horrific,” said Bean, the co-owner of Lava Lake Lamb in Hailey, Idaho. “We had incidents where we’d lose two dozen ewes and a couple of rams and a guard dog. Other animals were maimed.”
Back then, only a few dozen wolves lived in Idaho. Today, that number has risen to about 770. Many of them live near the Beans’ 800,000-acre ranching operation, located in central Idaho’s Wood River Valley, but wolf attacks there are now almost completely a thing of the past. “Now we have wolf depredation on our sheep every two or three years,” he said. “Those incidents might be one or two sheep.”
Bean and his staff accomplished this dramatic reduction in wolf attacks in a fairly unusual manner. Instead of resorting to hunting—which many farms do to control predators, and a process that led to the original extermination of wolves in the lower 48 states—they turned to a combination of low-tech techniques that use lights, strips of nylon, dogs and human presence, all of which help to scare wolves away from their lambs and cattle. “It works for us,” he told me.