Cattle Handling Seminars & Wolf Management

Cattle Handling Seminars & Wolf Management

The WSU Grant County Extension will be offering workshops next month aimed at showing ranchers how they can make changes in their cattle handling operations that will reduce not only their stress, but their animals as well. Veterinarian Tom Noffsinger will lead the workshops, which will include hands-on demonstrations of facility design and confined cattle handling, low stress handling in open range and pasture settings, handling bulls, and working cattle with horses and dogs. The January 14th and 15th workshops will be held at the Grant County Fairgrounds in Moses Lake.

Earlier this year state wildlife managers killed seven members of the Wedge Wolf Pack in northeast Washington after they repeatedly attacked and killed cattle from the Diamond M Ranch in Stevens County. Hearings on the state wolf management plan have been proposed. Vic Stokes, new President of the Washington Cattlemen’s Association, talks about the dynamics of wolf management in the state.

STOKES: Our wolf management plan calls for recovery with fifteen breeding pairs and we’ve got a lot of packs, so there’s a little bit of confusion in that regard sometimes when people start talking wolves. We’re kind of anxious to try to get these wolves under full state management and then see where we can go from there.

A status review on the gray wolf in Washington state by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife was due out in early October, but is now not expected until sometime in late January, early February.

STOKES: We’re hoping that they extend the distinct population segment that they okayed for the Northern Rock Mountain area, which includes the eastern third of our state, and just move it to the coast and consider it all the same distinct population, instead of targeting off a new one and having to go through the possibilities of further planning.

 

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network. 

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