By the time Tim Thompson finished his daily duties as a school bus driver, Bunny the Border Collie would be sitting by the tractor ready to help him feed the cattle.
“I got home that day and I thought, ‘where the hell is Bunny’?”
Thompson went to feed the cows without his usual companion when he noticed unusual behavior from the calves in the distance.
“I drove up there and saw that a great big wolf had ripped my dog to hell. There was an absolutely huge wolf track by the corpse.”
Thompson’s farm, located near Choiceland, has been a hot spot for wolves the last few years, he says. Thompson has seen large wolf tracks leading right up to his house and has had deer corpses left in his canola field.
“I’m 64 years old and until that point in time, we’ve never lost a dog to a coyote or a wolf before ... they just seem to be getting a little more brazen,” he says.
Roughly 80 kilometers to the east of the Thompson farm is where a government ordered wolf hunt project has been going on for the last five months. Wildlife Zone 49, which stretches from Carrot River down to Greenwater Lake Provincial park and east to Hudson Bay, has seen an increase in livestock predation complaints thought to be brought on by increased wolf population.
The Wolf Hunt program began on September 15, 2014 and will run until March 31, 2015. Out of the 100 licences made available in the area, 71 have been purchased so far. Each license represents two wolf tags meaning a total of 200 wolves could be killed during the hunt.
Mike Gollop from the Government of Saskatchewan Wildlife Management Section says that an increased number of farmers in the area claiming missing cattle sparked this pilot project.
A livestock predation compensation program run by Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation handles compensation for farmers who have lost cattle to predation, but with more and more claims coming in, Gollop says it was time the Saskatchewan Government stepped in.
“Currently a producer can get 100 per cent value of any livestock that is killed by predators provided that the inspector determines it was killed by a predator. If they have some doubts, they will get 50 per cent of the value, and if there is no remains whatsoever, they get nothing,” Gollop says.
Gollop says that wolves tend to not leave anything behind, leaving many farmers with zero compensation on missing cattle.
The wolf population in Saskatchewan is expected to be around 3,700. However, the last study done was in 2000. Gollop says that increase in wolf activity has been reported but it doesn’t mean there is a drastic change in total wolf population.
“There is no necessary reason for the number to change, because predator-prey balance can stay the same. What has changed is that there are more wolves along the southern forest boundary in that area than there were before,” Gollop says.
Biology professor at the University of Regina Mark Brigham says that losing up to 200 wolves will make a difference.
“It’s going to make a dent in the wolf population. Is it going to remove wolves from Saskatchewan? No. Is it insignificant? No. It’s somewhere in between,” he says. “It promotes rapid reproduction from the wolves that are left, so they are going to fill in that territory that is vacant. The problem is that they are going to come back very, very quickly and you’re going to have to keep doing it if you want to fix that problem.”
“We keep putting livestock in places that are wolf habitats and wolves expand to take advantage of that resource. We can’t stop them from doing that, nor frankly should we try.”
Other options to control livestock predation included an incentive program for trappers, or to use 1080 poison on known wolf locations.
“[The wolf hunt] was an opportunity that could perhaps increase harvest, wouldn’t cost us anything, and there were pressures from other groups. Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation and Saskatchewan Outfitters Association all pushed for a hunting season on wolves,” Gollop says.
“It is an easy way for governments to be seen to be doing something,” Brigham says. “It’s much more difficult to institute an appropriate long-term program to compensate people so that wolves and livestock can live in as much harmony as possible. Much easier to very cheaply, and very quickly say, ‘go pop off some wolves.”
To date there are no wolves reported to be taken, but the Saskatchewan Government will not be contacting license owners until after March 31 when the hunt is over.
“[200] was totally not going to happen ... We knew perfectly well from statistics available from other jurisdictions that in a forest hunt, six per cent is considered to be very good hunter success, so 200 tags would be 12 wolves,” says Gallop.
