1-10 IAN Predator Control

   When you’re looking for trouble or you have an agenda, it’s easy to find. Recent article in the Statesman accused the cattle industry in Idaho of trying to get money from the state to fund the control of predators that take out so many cows. Presumably Wolf lovers were responsible. Anyway, I went to a voice of reason, ICA Director Wyatt Prescott, and asked for clarification. What that is talking about is animal damage control and their predator control funding. We lost federal dollars for animal damage control and it was distributed between Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. So a member of the Idaho cattle Association brought a resolution to annual convention to increase a per head assessment for animal damage control to help fund a predator control program. The organization discussed this and talked about simply raising a per head assessment would not be equitable for all segments of the industry for the services rendered by wildlife services. So the resolution that came out of our convention was that the ICA will form a task force, multi-industry and stake holder task force across the entire livestock industry that benefit from wildlife services and figure out a way to assess and help find  animal damage control through predator control through wildlife services. After that there were some bloggers out there that said oh the ICA is going to ask the state of Idaho to help fund predator control, that was never true.