McIrvin lies in this article/Claims no Help from WDFW

McIrvin has to learn that people watch their lies, claiming WDFW isnt helping- and sack up Len, we get over 500,000 hack attempts and threats per month. Perhaps you yourself Len should have displayed better manners at public meetings 😉 Your Intimidation tactics came back to bite you finally.

The Diamond M ranch sits on the Kettle River in northeast Washington State, close enough to the Canadian border that a well-thrown rock might hit a range-riding Mountie and cause an international incident. It is a frontiersman’s dream: acres of prairie surrounded by wooded areas with the pristine Kettle River flowing through the middle of it. It’s an idyllic rural place where rough-hewn cowboys, who love the land as if it were family, gently tend their cattle. It hardly seems the place for a thing as dirty as a political battle.

But a bloody political battle — complete with actual death threats — is exactly what the McIrvin and Hedrick families who ranch the land are embroiled in. They are engaged with people who care little for truth and care even less for freedom. Environmentalist mobsters have targeted the family business because, sometimes, necessary action entails thinning the wolf pack in a lethal manner. And when even a single wolf is killed, environmentalists go predictably insane.

“We get a lot of death threats. My wife had to stop answering the phone,” said Len McIrvin, the patriarch of the family that runs the Diamond M. “They say it would be better if you were dead than a wolf…. Another call comes in that said, ‘If you’d like your kids to come home on the school bus, you’d better leave the wolves alone.’”

But the McIrvin-Hedrick clan has never shot a wolf. In Washington State, shooting a wolf, even to protect your livelihood, comes with a one-year prison sentence and a five-thousand dollar fine. Any lethal removal must be done under the auspices of the state’s fish and wildlife department, an agency with a well-documented history of avoiding such aggressive action.

Len McIrvin and his family have been ranching on the land for over 70 years. The small business sells its cattle to several nationally known meat processors. If you eat red meat, there’s a very good chance you’ve eaten some of the Diamond M’s product. In those 70 years, things have changed in a lot of ways, but never has the Diamond M been so challenged as it is now. Of course, it’s not just the wolves that threaten the Diamond M. The environmental mafia and the well-ensconced bureaucracies that assist them are even more threatening than the wolves themselves.

“The real problem with the wolves is politics,” said Steve McLaughlin, an advocate who works on behalf of ranchers in northeast Washington.

Where Did the Wolves Come From?

In the last century, wolves were almost completely gone in the lower 48 states, with only a few scattered packs in northern Minnesota and the Isle Royale National Park, an island in the middle of Lake Superior, which is technically a part of Michigan.

In 1995, the Clinton-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service re-introduced the gray wolf into Yellowstone National Park and a portion of central Idaho where the elk population was considered out of control and a threat to the delicate balance of the ecosystem. By that time, wolves had also re-introduced themselves from Canada to a remote area in northwestern Montana.

Wolves were trapped, captured, and removed from their natural habitat, where they were surviving quite nicely. They were then tranquilized, tagged, and set free in Yellowstone and central Idaho. The wolves were welcomed with open arms in Yellowstone. Idaho, however, was another story.

Yellowstone ecologists were soon giving glowing reports about the natural thinning of the elk herd due to wolf predation. New growth vegetation such as aspen and willow trees, upon which the elk had previously fed at an unsustainable rate, began to re-emerge. Other species, such as the beaver and the red fox, began to re-emerge due to the fact that the wolves now kept the unruly coyote population under control.

But in Idaho, the situation was different. Idaho’s state government had opposed the reintroduction of wolves into the state but was overruled by federal authorities. Initially, the Idaho state government refused to participate in the wolf management plan because of its objection to having wolves released there in the first place. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nez Perce tribe managed the wolf population at first, with the 35 wolves released there in 1995-96 quickly expanding, the government estimates, to over 700 wolves by 2007.

Those wolf packs, along with more naturally occurring wolf packs from Canada, began slowly migrating to neighboring states, including Washington, the home of the Diamond M Ranch. About a decade ago, the Diamond M Ranch’s problems with the newly introduced apex predator began.

“We suffered the first wolf kill of livestock since the 1930s on our ranch about 10 years ago. It was a confirmed wolf kill,” said McIrvin. “They’re killing about 70 head of our cattle a year now.”

And the trouble is about much more than dead cattle. The wolves’ constant attacks on the herd have greatly increased stress on the cattle, which leads to a condition known as “open cows,” which are females that cannot become pregnant. A normal, unstressed herd will experience two to three percent open cows plus a number of culled cows, which have become too old to breed. The stress caused by the wolf attacks has led to the Diamond M’s herd having approximately 20 percent open cows.

“If wolves were attacking people night and day, I don’t think you’d have too many people pregnant,” McIrvin said.

These open cows become automatically less valuable and must be sold at a discount. And there’s also the matter of the five to nine calves that each open cow should be producing over the next several years. All told, the Diamond M can expect to see losses of over a million dollars in the next six to seven years owing to wolf aggression. It’s a loss that a small family business can’t afford. And the State of Washington doesn’t seem to care.

Not only do the open cows sell at lower prices, their loss affects future earnings for ranchers. “If I sell off a three-year-old cow, I’m losing eight to nine years of future calves,” stated McIrvin. “Pretty soon, you’re looking at significant loss in gross revenue.”

The State of Washington Refuses to Help

Despite this, the legislature in Olympia is reluctant to assist the ranchers, owing to pressure from environmental groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Northwest, and Predator Defense, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that put both legal and rhetorical pressure on the state to leave the wolves alone.

“Our legislators in the Washington state government want to treat the wolves as a popularity contest,” McIrvin says. “The majority of the people on the west side of the state — they love wolves — so we’re going to leave them.”

In eastern Washington — the more rural part of the state where almost all of the wolf packs are located — people back commonsense measures to stop depredation, including forms of lethal removal of packs that are especially aggressive and threatening.

But to the liberals in western Washington, where no wolf packs threaten Seattle, Tacoma, or Olympia, the wolves are a success story: a valiant and noble species that must be protected from the true apex predator — humans.

The search for middle ground has yielded the 300-page Washington State Wolf Conservation and Management Plan, which stresses non-lethal solutions but, to the chagrin of those western Washington liberals, also allows for lethal measures of especially problematic wolf packs.

From the plan: “The purpose of the plan is to ensure the reestablishment of a self-sustaining population of gray wolves in Washington and to encourage social tolerance for the species by addressing and reducing conflicts.”

Sounds good, but a plan is only as good as its implementation. The Washington State wolf plan is a case study in how bureaucracy works: a one-size-fits-all plan, heavy on butt-covering documentation and lean on actual solutions. The lead agency in Washington charged with implementation is the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). And this agency is afflicted with the same infection that all bureaucracies seem to have: fear of making decisions.

Source: Ranchers Face Wolves at the Gate