Descendants of rewilded wolves are taking a heavy toll on cattle in Northern California and Oregon, killing calves and full-grown animals and putting stress on cow-calf operations and ranchers’ pocketbooks.

Because wolves are listed as an endangered species under state and federal law, ranchers are hamstrung: They can’t shoot or harass these protected predators. The penalty for killing a wolf is steep; federal law carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine, unless a rancher can prove that it was in self-defense.

While animal advocacy groups say the wolves are native apex predators that belong in California and other western states, some ranchers argue that there’s nothing natural about wolves’ stalking domestic cattle because there isn’t enough natural prey.

“They’re welfare wolves,” Janna Martin Gliatto, an owner at Table Rock Ranch in northern California, said. “We have entitled wolves—multiple generations.”

One wolf pack, known as the Whaleback Pack, near her ranch doesn’t seem inclined to hunt elk or deer, she said.

Since November 2021, wolves have killed at least 44 head of cattle at the Martin family’s ranch in Siskiyou County, Gliatto told The Epoch Times. Of those confirmed wolf kills, three were adult cows, and the rest were calves.

“There’s a handful of people and ranches like us that have been hit really hard,” she said. “I’ve had so much carnage.”

The protection of wolves has been a “costly experiment” for ranchers and taxpayers who foot the bill for it, Gliatto said.

In 2021, state lawmakers voted to disburse $3 million to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to develop a pilot program to mitigate the effects of wolves on livestock producers.

The resulting Wolf-Livestock Compensation Program was started in 2022, and by March 2024, the funds were exhausted after 109 claims were paid out to livestock producers for wolf depredation in Siskiyou, Lassen, Plumas, and Tulare counties.

Gliatto received two years of partial compensation to pay a range rider to patrol the herd at night, “but the funds ran out, so now it’s out-of-pocket,” she said.

In 2024, the state appropriated another $600,000 for the CDFW to continue the Wolf-Livestock Compensation Program, but the program no longer subsidizes ranchers for the cost of deterrent efforts such as range riders and is limited to compensation for direct loss only.

CDFW spokeswoman Katie Talbot said California’s wolf population is estimated at between 50 and 70 in total. The agency has confirmed that 163 cattle and six sheep have been killed or injured by wolves since 2011, when the first collared wolf from Oregon entered California, Talbot told The Epoch Times in an email.

She said that of the initial $3 million Wolf-Livestock Compensation Program fund, more than $2 million was paid out for direct loss and deterrence efforts to ranchers in Siskiyou County, while those in Lassen and Plumas counties received about $490,000 and $476,000, respectively. About $16,000 went to Tulare County. Since October 2024, the average compensation per head was $2,870, Talbot said.

Examining Expenses

A recently released study by University of California–Davis professor Tina Saitone, a livestock and rangeland economics specialist, found that one wolf can cause between $69,000 and $162,000 in direct and indirect cattle losses, from outright attacks, lower pregnancy rates in cows, and decreased weight gain in calves.

Saitone’s research team used motion-activated field cameras, GPS collars, wolf scat analysis, and cattle tail-hair samples to show how the expanding protected gray wolf population is affecting cattle operations, “leading to millions of dollars in losses,” according to the study.

The research showed that during the 2022 and 2023 summer seasons, 72 percent of wolf scat samples from the Lassen Pack—in western Lassen and northern Plumas counties—contained cattle DNA. It also found elevated hair cortisol levels in cattle that ranged in areas with wolves, indicating an increase in stress.

Aside from the financial effects, Gliatto said the wolf issue has been emotionally taxing on ranchers who’ve witnessed continual attacks on their herds and “hypocrisy” over what is considered humane treatment of cattle.

Ranchers are afraid to brand their cattle because some animal rights groups view the practice as inhumane, but, she said, “you can have a wolf literally tear your animals apart while they’re alive and eat them, and people just turn a blind eye.”

According to Gliatto, wolves wouldn’t be thriving in the wild without heavily supplementing their diet with cattle, which, in some cases, is their primary food source.

The wolves have created fierce competition at the top of the food chain because there aren’t enough deer and elk to feed them and other predators such as mountain lions, bears, and coyotes, she said.

“We have a huge predator bubble,” Gliatto said.

CDFW reported that there were seven documented wolf packs in California in 2024, along with evidence of other wolves in the state.

Return of the Wolf

The first wolves showed up at Gliatto’s ranch in 2020.

A lone male wolf, OR-85, collared in February 2020, left his natal Mount Emily pack near La Grande, Oregon, crossed into California, and found a mate from another pack from southwestern Oregon. The pair formed the Whaleback Pack and have produced 21 pups since 2021, according to CDFW.

Tracking showed cluster points of OR-85 near an elk herd on ranchland that the family leased, but the pack doesn’t feed on them, Gliatto said.

The elk herd, often spotted at Grass Lake, stopped going there, she said.

“They just moved away from the wolves, and the wolves didn’t follow them,” Gliatto said.

Instead, she said, the wolves have become habituated to preying on cattle at her family’s ranch, which typically has more than 1,500 head, including cow-calf pairs, and replacement heifers.

Table Rock Ranch borders timberland at the forest-edge of a mountain range, so when wolves descend into the valley, her cattle are the first meal they see. Hence, from a wolf’s perspective, it makes no sense to go farther down into the valley, where there are more people and less cover, Gliatto said.

Amaroq Weiss, an attorney and the senior West Coast wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said some cattle herds are hit harder than others.

“You constantly have animals that are vulnerable because they’re not being checked on,” she told The Epoch Times. “They’ve eaten poisonous weeds, they’ve gotten wounded for some reason, they’re having birthing complications. All those things are going to draw wolves in.”

Wolves aren’t targeting the closest ranch or the first cattle herd they encounter, and they will often roam through pastures filled with cattle “and just keep on going out the other end of the pasture to hunt wild prey,” Weiss said.

The Whaleback Pack, and some others in California, cover immense territories compared with most wolf packs in other western states that have more elk and deer, because “they’re looking for a food source,” she said.

Siskiyou County wolf liaison Patrick Griffin, who investigates suspected wolf kills for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the 44 confirmed kills at Table Rock Ranch “sounds accurate,” noting that it has been the hardest-hit ranch in the state.

More than 80 “confirmed” or “probable” cattle kills have been attributed to the Whaleback Pack, Griffin told The Epoch Times.

Descendants of Rewilded Wolves

Weiss said that wolves are listed as an endangered species for a reason.

When European settlers arrived in North America, an estimated 2 million wolves spanned the land from the Arctic into Mexico, but within a few hundred years, they were almost wiped out, except for small populations in northeastern Minnesota and on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, she said.

Weiss said that wolves have been protected under the federal Endangered Species Act since the mid-1970s, but because many people see them as “killing machines,” they’re a “political hot potato,” and it took another 20 years before wolves were reintroduced in the United States.

In the mid-1990s, North American gray wolves from Canada were captured in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia and reintroduced in Wyoming and Idaho—31 in Wyoming inside Yellowstone National Park, and 35 in central Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return wilderness, she said.

As their populations grew, offspring of the Idaho wolf pack moved into Washington state and Oregon, and their descendants eventually made their way to California, Weiss said.

Weiss added that all of California’s wolves either were natural dispersals arriving on their own feet from Oregon or were born in the state after those dispersers arrived.

She refuted the belief that the wolves in northern California are a non-native species of Canadian wolves, rumored to be much larger than those that once inhabited the region.

The Arctic wolf is a larger subspecies of the North American gray wolf, while the Mexican gray wolf is a smaller subspecies, she said.

Male gray wolves weigh between 65 pounds and 175 pounds, and females range from 50 pounds to 120 pounds, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.

California’s deer population was about 2 million in the 1960s, but by 2017, it had dwindled to about 530,000, according to CDFW estimates.

Reintroducing deer and elk as natural prey would be challenging for government agencies to ensure enough favorable habitat, and states are reluctant to move these animals from outside or within their states because they don’t want to spread chronic wasting disease, which is always fatal to deer, elk, and moose.

The disease was detected among deer and elk in California in May 2024 and is widespread in the United States, Canada, and some European and Asian countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Wolf Problem Getting Worse

Mike Ensley, an experienced rancher at Working Circle, which coaches ranchers on ways to mitigate the effects of wolves, said evidence shows that the Whaleback Pack has become “habituated” to cattle, passing up deer and elk and going straight for livestock.

Ensley, who works with ranchers mainly in California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state, said that before the return of wolves, ranchers weren’t having the number of losses they’re having now.

California already has too many wolves without enough natural prey to sustain them, and if nothing is done to control the wolf population, the problems can only get worse, he told The Epoch Times.

Ensley observed wolf behavior when he ran cattle at ranches in Oregon and encountered the Rogue Pack, known for killing cattle in Klamath and Jackson counties.

“I spent several years running cows with them wolves and learned quite a bit there,” he said.

Wolves, Ensley said, seem to vary in size from region to region; he’s seen larger ones in southern Oregon and northern California.

“I’ve seen some monstrous dogs that seem way bigger than other wolves,” he said. “They’re big, terribly powerful critters that can take down a full-grown bull that weighs 1,800 to 2,200 pounds.”

Large wolf packs of 15 to 20 wolves eat “a massive amount of meat,” Ensley said.

Because of their feast-and-famine eating habits, a wolf can consume up to 20 pounds of meat in a single feeding, and wolves can also go days or weeks without food, according to the International Wolf Center.

Unconfirmed Kills

Ensley said he has witnessed “some real dishonesty” when obvious wolf kills were not confirmed by the state agency as wolf depredation.

In one case, Ensley responded to a call from a rancher in Oregon about a suspected wolf kill.

“The cow was still breathing but never going to get up—ripped to shreds, blood everywhere, tracks everywhere, wolves still present, video footage, photos, everything,” he said. “There was absolutely no doubt.”

But when the CDFW wildlife officer arrived to investigate, the attack was not confirmed as a wolf kill, Ensley said.

He said he believes that many wolf attacks on cattle either are unknown or aren’t reported.

“You have an awful lot of ranchers who now have so much distrust of the state agencies that they just straight-up won’t say anything. They’re just done. They don’t want to fight with them,” Ensley said.

Are Wolves Still Endangered?

Wolves were delisted federally as an endangered species during President Donald Trump’s first administration, but they were relisted when President Joe Biden was in the White House.

Vanessa Kauffman, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman, said in an email to The Epoch Times that gray wolves are listed as endangered in 44 states, threatened in Minnesota, and under state jurisdiction in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, portions of eastern Oregon and Washington state, and north-central Utah.

Ensley said he doesn’t believe that they should be on the endangered species list.

“They are everywhere. I’m getting reports of them clear over on the coastal range and all over places that they swear they’re not,” he said.

According to the International Wolf Center, there are approximately 5,500 gray wolves in the lower 48 states.

CDFW recently announced plans to review the status of gray wolves, which are currently listed as endangered under the California Endangered Species Act. Talbot said the review will include “tribal and public input, as well as independent peer review.”

Talbot said she isn’t aware of any “wolf cages” that have been erected at California bus stops to protect schoolchildren from potential wolf encounters; parents in New Mexico have erected several such cages.

The law gives people the right to defend themselves from wolf attacks, but Talbot said such cases are rare and that gray wolves haven’t posed a credible public safety threat.

Ensley said that as a precaution, wolves should be “pushed back to the mountains where they’re supposed to be.”

“These wolves are now hanging around houses and bus stops. That’s not OK in my book,” he said. “As this population grows and they get bolder and bolder ... there could definitely be some serious issues, and it should be addressed now before it happens.”