A gray wolf

A Washington Fish and Wildlife commissioner stepped back Tuesday from a claim she made at a commission meeting last week that ranchers have turned out cattle near wolf dens.

Melanie Rowland said she does not know of any particular case and that she was repeating something she recalled hearing. “That was in my memory. I could be wrong,” she said.

Rowland made the allegation Friday after commissioners heard Reardan High School FFA students, practicing for a state competition, argue different viewpoints on managing predators.

“Doesn’t it make some sense for the livestock producer to say, ‘OK, I’ll have my cattle go somewhere else and so we can separate them, rather than say, ‘OK, I don’t care if there’s a wolf den there. That’s my allotment and my cows are going out there?'” Rowland asked.

A student replied that it would be neither smart nor responsible for a rancher to turn out cattle near a wolf den, but she had never heard of that happening.

“It has happened. To help you prepare, you need to know that this does happen sometime,” Rowland said.

“You had a very good answer, but it should be, ‘Yeah, we know, that can be a problem, and yes, livestock producers should take some responsibility to say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, maybe I had good grazing there before, but we ought to put them somewhere else now.'”

Fish and Wildlife does not know of any rancher who knowingly put livestock in harm’s way, department spokeswoman Staci Lehman said in an email.

Livestock have been found near dens and where packs gather later in summer, but livestock move about and so do wolves, Lehman said.

“The consensus of the wolf team is that they don’t believe any producer intentionally has put livestock out to graze near a wolf den,” she said.

Then-Washington State University wolf researcher Rob Wielgus claimed in 2016 that a rancher turned out cattle “on top” of a wolf den.

WSU repudiated the claim, stating it had no basis in fact and caused “anger and confusion.” The cattle were released 4 miles from the den. The ranch did not know the den was there.

Scott Nielsen, director of the Cattle Producers of Washington range-riding program, said he still hears the old claim repeated as fact. “It’s really troubling a wildlife commissioner would be regurgitating something so inaccurate,” he said.

Rowland said she may have been thinking of Wielgus’ claim, though she said she thought she had heard about something more recent. At one point at Friday’s meeting, she asked, “Am I wrong, guys?”

No one volunteered to answer the question.

“It was a golden opportunity to correct the record that they just watched go by,” Nielsen said.