How Many Wolves Is Enough?
The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in Northern California’s Sierra Valley. He started finding the bleeding bodies of calves—some still alive, so badly paralyzed that they’d need to be shot. After weeks of this, Roen finally saw a kill himself. “One wolf grabbed a cow and spun her around, while another grabbed a calf,” he told me. “He tore it into three pieces in 30 seconds.”
Every night, Roen would go out in his pickup truck and try to keep the wolves away from his animals, until exhaustion drove him to bed in the hours before dawn. He came to dread the sound of his cows bawling for their lost calves. By June, Roen, who is also a Sierra County supervisor, and his fellow ranchers had persuaded the state to intervene: A team started to patrol the Sierra Valley rangeland, harassing wolves with rubber bullets, sirens, and eventually drones. At one point, Roen said, officials even tried piling frozen beavers outside the wolves’ den to sate their hunger. But still, the kills continued.
What Roen and other ranchers wanted, really, was for the state to kill the wolves. But gray wolves, which were exterminated from California roughly a century ago, are still listed as endangered there, making it illegal to kill, harm, or harass them. By the fall, the same pack of wolves had taken down roughly 50 of Roen’s cattle, he estimates—more than he’d ever lost to grizzlies and mountain lions combined, and a major proportion of the roughly 90 livestock killed or injured in the region. The state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife determined that this was “far outside any comparable experience across the state or the West,” and sanctioned the first wolf killings since the animals had returned to California in 2011. In October, officials tranquilized three adult wolves from a helicopter, then injected them with chemical euthanasia. They also shot a fourth wolf—a six-month-old pup—who’d been mistaken for a similar-looking adult.
The consequences of killing wolves are not what they might have been 50 years ago, when just hundreds of them were left in the contiguous United States and the federal government first declared the species endangered. Nowadays, thousands prowl the landscape—a fraction of the millions that may have once lived here, but still constituting one of the most successfully recovered species in the country. At this point, “I don’t think you can shoot and trap wolves out of existence,” Diana K. Boyd, a wildlife biologist who has extensively researched wolves, told me.
Some Americans are hoping that killing wolves could again become a national norm. Already a few western states are actively working to reduce their gray-wolf populations through annual hunts. When I asked Richard Egan, another California rancher, how many wolves should be in the state, he told me there was no correct answer other than zero. The country’s official stance is that gray wolves should live here. Americans are still deciding how many they can tolerate.
The tensions between today’s wolves and humans are, essentially, the same as they were in the 1800s. As expanding agriculture sent wild populations of deer and elk into decline, wolves began to prey instead on livestock—prompting people, in turn, to kill wolves. By the middle of the 20th century, decades of aggressive hunting, trapping, and mass poisoning had pushed the Lower 48’s gray wolves to the point of near extermination.
After decades of monitoring and intervention, some imperiled species are still barely staving off extinction; wolves’ evolutionary grit, meanwhile, has surprised even conservationists. Human initiatives have undoubtedly helped—particularly, the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho in 1995, which was driven by the Nez Perce Tribe. But on their own, gray wolves trickled across the Canadian border, back into Montana; after expanding throughout the Mountain West and Northwest, they wandered down into California. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved to take gray wolves off the federal endangered-species list, though that decision has been under contention since.
With the return of gray wolves has come the return of gray-wolf problems. The wolves are facing greater pressures than they once did to find food in a country filled out with cities and people; naturally, they are again preying on livestock. Ranching, too, has become more challenging and less stable in recent years, amid droughts and rising feed costs. In California, in particular, where elk remain relatively scarce, and deer populations have been in prolonged decline, “there’s nothing to sustain these wolves but cattle,” Roen told me. One recent analysis found that a single wolf can cost a rancher up to $162,000. But ranchers remain limited in how much they can intervene. “If they killed every one of my cattle, I’d just have to sit and watch unless they threatened me personally,” Egan, whose cattle losses have roughly quadrupled since wolves arrived in his county, said.
In Oregon, too, where gray wolves have been established for longer, ranchers feel hamstrung. Kimberlee Kerns’s family has lost hundreds of sheep and cattle to wolves since 2009; the animals that survive tend to gain less weight and conceive fewer lambs and calves. To keep the sheep safe, her team has been herding them into pens every night, which raises the animals’ stress levels and makes it easier for them to get one another sick. And after being repeatedly vexed by wolves, Kerns told me, her cattle “want to fight the herding dogs”—which, although domesticated, are still technically the same species.
Ranchers and wolf advocates have been able to deter wolves from feasting on livestock on some properties, Karin Vardaman, who’s part of a group trying to minimize wolf-human conflict, told me. Ranchers can fly brightly colored streamers to spook wolves, and try to keep animals off terrain that might make hunting easier; they can dispatch horseback patrols on their property. But Egan and Roen said that they’ve seen those tactics fail, too—perhaps because the wolves quickly learn that flashy repellents pose no genuine threat. “They’re desensitizing the wolves to the point where they’re emboldened,” Egan said.
These gentler efforts, Egan and Roen argue, might carry more weight if local wolves understood that humans might kill them, too. And, of course, the more wolves die in these harvests, the fewer might trouble livestock.
Around the end of 2008, the year before Montana opened its first gray wolf-hunting season, animus against the predators reached a boiling point. A series of tougher-than-average winters had squeezed the local wildlife; hunters were driving into town with less to show for their efforts. “The hunters that year saw not as much deer, and wolf tracks everywhere,” Kent Laudon, a wildlife biologist who worked as a wolf specialist in Montana’s wildlife department for more than a decade, told me. Locals began to protest outside of his department’s office, calling for wolves to be purged. That winter, Laudon recalled driving across town and counting the bumper stickers, which were emblazoned with the silhouette of a wolf head and , that read Smoke a pack a day.
The next year, Montana’s quota for wolf kills debuted at 75. That number has grown steadily over the past couple of decades to more than 400. Quentin Kujala, the chief of conservation policy at Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, told me that the number of lethal wolf removals that officials have had to conduct due to livestock conflicts has decreased in that same time frame. But livestock conflicts—and complaints about them—also plateaued in the 2010s, and have stayed at roughly that level ever since. The state’s wolf population, too, has held rather steady at about 1,100 for several years. “We seem to have arrived at an equilibrium,” Kujala said.
For years, Montana’s official policy has said that the state must maintain at least 15 breeding pairs of wolves to keep them off the state’s endangered-species list. (Because of wolves’ complex social structure, researchers have disagreed on the size of the wolf population necessary to maintain that many breeding pairs—but according to Kujala, the state now relies on a very conservative estimate of about 450 wolves.) But locals and politicians disagree vehemently about how many wolves above that threshold they’d like to support. In 2021, the state government passed a law that called for reducing the wolf population to a “sustainable” level.
Apart from specifying that the number of wolves had to exceed the state’s endangerment cutoff, legislators never defined what such a sustainable level might be. Mike Phillips, a former Democratic member of Montana’s state Senate, told me that if the goal is to actually recover the species, humans should set their sights higher than just barely exceeding the threshold at which the animals might snuff out. Paul Fielder, a Republican member of the state’s House of Representatives and a longtime advocate for more aggressive wolf management, told me he sees little reason for the state to maintain more wolves than the bare minimum. “They’re four-legged terrorists,” Fielder said. “How many terrorists are okay in your neighborhood?”
Across the rest of the country, too, opinions about how to manage wolves tend to break along partisan lines—to the point where reminding people of their political identity can amplify their positive or negative feelings toward the animals. And although most Americans remain in favor of protecting gray wolves, only a very small minority of people in the U.S. regularly interact with the animals—primarily in rural regions. A few ranchers told me they were frustrated that so much of the wolves’ fate was being determined by people who wouldn’t have to live through the direct consequences.
Wolves do have a way of riling peoples’ emotions, Alma Sanchez, a carnivore biologist with the Nez Perce Tribe, told me—perhaps, she and others said, because conflicts over their future put into relief so many fault lines of American life, between urban and rural existence, between conservatives and liberals, between trust in government and a desire for individual sovereignty. Some researchers hoped that a few wolf killings might mollify ranchers, but recent studies have suggested that this approach can instead reinforce anti-wolf sentiment. In one infamous case in Wyoming—where wolves have been delisted since 2017 and can be hunted and trapped year-round in most of the state—a man was arrested in 2024 after he allegedly ran over a wolf with his snowmobile, then paraded her injured body around a bar before shooting her. (He has pleadedpled not guilty to the charge.)
And as Montana has found, the math of “fewer wolves, fewer problems” doesn’t always work out. Killing a wolf can destabilize its pack to the point where the remaining members become more likely to go after livestock. And although wolves do naturally prey on wild deer and elk, support for the notion that the predators are cratering wild game populations is mixed at best, several experts told me. In several cases, researchers have found that wolves’ effect on those species pales in comparison to the impact of factors such as disease, environmental conditions, habitat loss, and other predators. The benefits to livestock, too, may be quite modest: One recent study found that, across states, killing one wolf saves, on average, less than 10 percent of a single cow. For those reasons and more, several wolf researchers told me they remain skeptical that ever-increasing wolf killings will chart the path to coexistence. “If it’s not going to reduce conflict, or make you feel better about wolves, why do you want to kill wolves?” Naomi Louchouarn, a conservation ecologist with Humane World for Animals, told me.
Although some advocates for increased wolf harvests can point to an ideal—and low—number of wolves they’d like to aim for, the conservationists I spoke with didn’t feel comfortable identifying a “correct” number of wolves for the country. The answer, Sanchez told me, depends less on what the landscape can support and more on what Americans’ attitudes will. But people who want more wolves and people who want fewer both argue that the other side is letting their feelings about wolves get in the way of rational thinking. Fielder, while making the case that Montana needed fewer wolves, repeatedly told me that the worst way to approach wolf management was “entirely through emotion.” Days earlier, while advocating for the animals, Boyd, the wildlife biologist, had told me exactly the same.