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Putting up fladry in Big Wood River, ID
Photo Credit: Suzanne Stone

Learn more about the nonlethal methods to protect livestock from wolves utilized on the Big Wood River Project

LIVESTOCK AND WOLVES: PREVENTING CONFLICT WITH FLADRY

For hundreds of years, ranchers have had to address issues of protecting their livestock from natural predators, sometimes forced to do so in a lethal manner. When wolves prey upon livestock, the social tolerance for the number of depredations and the presence of these animals decreases.

Fladry, a line mounted along the top of a fence from which strips of fabric or some other material are suspended have been used to deter wolves from traversing a fence-line for centuries. First developed and used by hunters in Eastern Europe to funnel wolves into an area, once caught in the fladry trap wolves were reluctant to cross the barrier and were shot. Currently, fladry is used to confine wolf movements to certain areas and constrain their depredations on livestock through creation of barriers that wolves don’t like to cross or otherwise impair their predation ability.

A prevalent societal goal across the West is to protect valuable livestock from carnivores, reducing depredation losses, creating an eco-system where both domestic and wild animals can co-exist. Fladry can play a role among a suite of preventive measures available and offers a cost-effective mitigation tool for the problem of wolf predation on livestock on a local scale.

OBAMA STOPS BUSH'S LAST-MINUTE ROLLBACKS

New administration to make its own decisions on hasty actions
by RODDY SCHEER, E/The Environmental Magazine

The day after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the new administration ordered a stop to all pending regulations pushed through in the waning days of the Bush administration. In a publicly released memo, Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said that the White House will carry out its own legal and policy reviews on the specific rules before making a final decision on them. Some of the new Bush rules that will likely never see the light of day include proposals to eliminate protection for threatened gray wolves in the northern Rockies, to weaken the Endangered Species Act, to allow mining companies to dump their waste within sensitive riparian zones and to exempt large-scale factory farms from notifying government officials when they release unsafe levels of toxic emissions into surrounding communities.

Despite Obama’s success in stopping these rules from going into effect, many other so-called “midnight regulations” have already become law. “While we are pleased that the new administration has put a stop to these hasty actions, there are some rules we continue to monitor,” said Patti Goldman of the nonprofit Earthjustice. The group is working with a diverse coalition of environmental groups in launching challenges in federal court to other eleventh-hour rule changes beyond the reach of the new administration.

This story first appeared in E/The Environmental Magazine on January 25, 2009.
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?4538

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