'Shoot, shovel and shut up'? As wolves kill more cattle, ranchers say it's time to get tough

[Zorro]

Standing among his cattle in a broad green pasture, beneath a brilliant blue sky about an hour north of Lake Tahoe, rancher Dan Greenwood surveyed the idyllic landscape and called it what he feels it has become: a death trap.

Behind him, a 3-month-old calf that had been mauled by wolves the night before lay in the grass with deep wounds on its flanks. Two of its legs were so badly injured they could barely support the calf’s weight when it tried to stand. The animal’s agitated mother paced a few feet away.

Greenwood wrapped his hand around one of the calf’s ankles and gently rolled it onto its back to inspect the savage bite wounds.

He was trying to decide whether to give the calf another day to see if it could recover enough to keep up with its mother — or put it out of its misery before the wolves returned to finish the job.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-05-30/as-wolves-kill-more-cattle-california-ranchers-say-time-to-start-shooting

[k_buddy762]

1. Is the wolf population out of control?

Might just be time to give out more tags to hunters. Or place them on the varmint list for a year or two. That will get the population under control quickly.

[2naSalit]

2. Or, the rancher...

Should tend to his cattle more carefully, then the wolves won't get his cattle.

I live in wolf country and have studied them and cattle interactions and in most cases, the rancher doesn't do the job well.

Cattle don't belong in the ecosystem.

Been fighting the wolf wars for a couple decades, you comment is among the most ignorant on the landscape. If you had any idea about nature and how the cattle industry has been fucking it up for everyone else for over a century and that's one of the reasons for many problems in the west, but I digress.

Killing the wolves won't solve the problem, ranchers actually doing their jobs, or removing the cattle from wolf habitat, is the more realistic answer.

[S/V Loner]

5. 100%...

I am a wildlife photographer and have spent the past two years with coyotes and, like wolves, they get a bad rap. They and the wolves have every right to live their lives in their natural environment and it is up to the cattlemen to manage their herds better to limit losses and accept the losses they do have to the cost of doing business.

[2naSalit]

8. Yup!

[obamanut2012]

10. No

[k_buddy762]

11. ?

[2naSalit]

3. Not out of control...

The ranchers are, though. Most are pretty lazy when it comes to actually protecting their cattle. If they put half the energy into better practices as they in their wolf-hate, they wouldn't have wolf problems. Tried and true out here in magatana, WY and Idaho. California ranchers should get their heads out of their asses and do their jobs.

[multigraincracker]

4. Starve the ranchers. Cut back on red meat.

Not at all healthy in eating as much as we do.

[k_buddy762]

6. I have been eating

2-3 ribeyes, london broils, tri-tips, or sirloins a day for approaching 4 years, and I am healthier now that I have been at any other point in my life.

[RandomNumbers]

7. Your diet would kill the biosphere

if everyone did it.

I seriously doubt your anecdotal claim of being healthier for eating so much red meat. Clearly you don't have a remotely sedentary lifestyle, which is great for you - and that is probably the reason for feeling so healthy despite your heavy red-meat diet. But just because you are feeling healthier for now, doesn't mean that you really are. You do you, though.

Most people don't have an active enough lifestyle to support that kind of diet, and if 8+ billion people on the planet did, and all that red meat were being produced, we'd be in even more climate trouble than we already are.

[k_buddy762]

9. More for me then

but there are plenty doing it, and more every day.