Category Archives: Predator “Control”

Dog Left Out in March Must Fend Off More Than the Cold

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copyrighted wolf in water

One year after wolf attack, dog fends off cougar at Carlton home

One year after wolf attack, dog fends off cougar at Carlton home

[Automatic response? track down and kill the predators.]

by admin on Mar 6, 2014
By Ann McCreary

It’s been a tough year for Shelby, a wolf-husky hybrid dog owned by John Stevie of Carlton. In March 2013 the dog was attacked by a gray wolf just outside her home, and early Monday morning (March 3) she was attacked again — this time by a cougar.

The unlucky dog has been lucky enough to survive both attacks.

Stevie had let Shelby out at about 4 a.m. Monday and soon heard the dog crying, said Sharon Willoya, Stevie’s girlfriend.

“We both raced to the door and she came running in. She wouldn’t let us touch her at first because she was frightened. We finally got her calm and noticed she was bleeding,” Willoya said Tuesday (March 4).

The 68-pound dog had cuts on her shoulder and chest, and required more than a dozen stitches, Willoya said.

Stevie reported the attack, and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) enforcement officers arrived with hounds a few hours after the attack. They tracked the cougar into a boulder field, but because it was a dangerous situation for the dogs, they left, said Capt. Chris Anderson, WDFW regional enforcement supervisor.

Wildlife officials returned Tuesday morning, found new tracks near Stevie’s home, tracked the cougar and treed it. The cougar, a healthy female, was shot and killed.

Willoya said wildlife officials found evidence that the cougar had “bedded down” not far from the house. “They think when Shelby came around the house, the cougar was there,” she said.

Stevie’s dog made news last year when she was attacked by a wolf on the deck of Stevie’s home at the foot of McClure Mountain. The dog received puncture wounds and lacerations to its head and neck in the attack.

Stevie subsequently took Shelby with him to Olympia, where Stevie testified before the Legislature in favor of a bill allowing citizens to shoot wolves that are attacking pets or livestock. Gray wolves are currently protected as an endangered species under federal and state law.

The cougar killed on Tuesday is the sixth cat shot by wildlife enforcement officers in the Methow Valley since December following attacks on domestic animals. At least four other dogs have been attacked, including a dog killed on Christmas day.

Cougars have also attacked cats, goats, sheep, chickens and calves.

Anderson said a hunter killed a cougar last week in the Pearrygin game management unit north of Winthrop. That brings the total number of cougars killed by hunters in the Methow Valley this winter to six.

Because of the high number of cougar incidents this winter, WDFW has issued special permits allowing hunters to use hounds to hunt cougars in the Methow Valley. Three permits have been issued for the Gardner game management unit, and two have been issued for the Pearrygin unit. Each permit allows one cougar to be killed.

So far, none of the special permit holders has taken a cougar, Anderson said.

“There are different theories bouncing around” about why the valley has seen so many cougar incidents, Anderson said.

“The general feeling is it’s probably because of the weird winter we’ve had,” Anderson said. “Normally we have cats that are visible because they follow the deer herds. Without snow the deer were really spread out and so the cats were spread out more, and that’s why people were seeing them in all parts of the valley.”
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Snow Leopard Survival Threatened by Cashmere Industry

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http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/46440
From: Dr Charudutt Mishra, The Ecologist, September 19, 2013

As London Fashion Week concludes, Dr Charudutt Mishra explains how demand for cashmere is affecting Central Asian wildlife, and how enlisting the support of local people will be essential for the future of snow leopard conservation.

The mountains of Central Asia are where the endangered snow leopards live. The higher Himalayas, the Pamirs, the Tien Shan, the Altai, all remote and faraway, seemingly insulated from our consumerist lifestyles. Indeed, the main causes of the cat’s endangerment appear to arise largely from local activities – persecution in retaliation against predation on livestock, for instance. Understandable, as livestock continues to remain a precious resource for people in these climatically and topographically harsh mountain landscapes.

Living thousands of miles away, it is difficult to imagine that our daily choices, literally the clothes we choose to wear, are shaping the chances of survival – or extinction – of the snow leopard and several other species of the Central Asian mountains.

The surging global demand for cashmere, that wonderful soft and warm fibre, is compromising the survival prospects of the snow leopard, the saiga, and a host of other iconic species of the Himalayas and Central Asia. Yet, the same fashion industry is also bringing better livelihood opportunities for local people, our biggest partners and hope for wildlife conservation in these mountains. It sounds complex, and it is complex.

What exactly is going on, and what do we do?

In a recent paper I co-authored with my friend Joel Berger and our Mongolian colleague Buuveibaatar, we have tried to explore the complex pathways through which the largely Western demand for cashmere is affecting Central Asian wildlife. Cashmere is derived from the lightweight under hair of domestic goats, and the bulk of the global production comes from snow leopard landscapes of Central Asia.

Supplying the increasing global demand for cashmere is met with by increasing the goat population. So across large parts of Central Asia, we see an ongoing escalation of livestock populations, and changes in herd composition in favour of goats. Mongolia alone has seen an increase in its livestock population from approximately five million in 1990 to 14 million in 2010.

As domestic herds grow, they consume the bulk of the forage available in the mountain pastures, leaving behind inadequate food for the several species of wild herbivores that inhabit these mountains and arid zones that we have worked in. These include many wild relatives of livestock, such as the ibex, the blue sheep, and the argali that constitute an important genetic resource, in addition to being the natural prey species of the snow leopard and other predators such as the wolf.