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Tallying up the costs and benefits of managing wolves in Wyoming

A wolf howling with a foggy background
Wikimedia Commons
“When it comes to having the economic benefits of wolves, it's very difficult to narrow down just wolves, right? Because wolves don't exist in a void,” says journalist Suzie Dundas.

What’s the financial value of wolves in Wyoming?

That’s the question behind a new article in the travel magazine Matador. On the one hand, it costs the state $680,000 a year to manage them, plus more than $226,000 to pay ranchers for the livestock they kill. On the other hand, wildlife watchers pay up to $7,600 a person to hire tour guides to see them, and the state sold $45,000 in wolf hunting licenses last year.

Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards sat down with reporter Suzie Dundas, who wrote the article “Are wolves worth the cost? The American West’s new wildlife dilemma,” to talk through the findings.

Editor's Note: This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Suzie Dundas:  Wolf watchers, they're big business. They spend money on camera equipment. They spend money on guides. They stay in hotels, they rent cars, they buy food. So it's really created this tourism economy, not just in the summer for the wildlife, but also in the winter when wolves are easier to spot. It's really bringing in a lot of money and switching it to sort of a year round tourism economy, which aside from skiing, a lot of towns don't normally benefit from.

Melodie Edwards: There's also a benefit to the state in terms of wolf hunting.

SD: It brings in, I believe it was about $45,000. So it's not a huge amount of money, but it is some income. In other states that have more wolves, that obviously can be a greater number, because they can issue more permits, they can charge more.

[Hunters] do bring in money. They obviously stay in the same hotels. They also have to hire guides. Depending on the state, there might be rules that you have to have a guide or the permit might cost more because you are out of state, and in places like Idaho, which has far more wolves, that tourism economy is bringing in more money and is bringing in hunters who traditionally also are high value spenders.

Let me talk a little bit about the limitations that we have, though, in terms of benefiting from wolves in Wyoming. There's some geographic limitations. For example, there's parts of the state that are much better suited habitat-wise to wolves. Specifically, those sort of the northwest part of the state around Yellowstone and the surrounding area.

There are a lot of economic limitations. There's obviously tons of ranching. There's tons of farming. For the obvious reasons, you can't combine too many wolves with areas that are big with ranching.

There's also the public sentiment of whether or not people want wolves, and whether those reasons are valid or not, they still vote and they still have a say in the future of their state.

There's also some limitations of, honestly, the wolf populations themselves. They have large ranges. You can't have too many in a close area. You have to have reasonable food sources. So these populations, they have to stay within a certain number regardless. There's only so much that people can do, especially in a state where the territory is only so large.

ME: In terms of the financial benefits of wolves, how does livestock depredation play into how that all balances out?

SD: Livestock depredation is not, if you look just at the numbers, a huge amount. In Wyoming in 2023, there were 49 livestock in total. That was a mix of mostly cattle and sheep and goats. So, on the whole, that's really not a huge number when you look at sort of Wyoming's overall ranching industry.

But it can be for the person who owns that livestock. Especially if they're a small producer that doesn't have that many heads of cattle, it can have a serious impact. Especially because there are some hurdles to actually showing that it was a wolf that killed your animal. If a wolf does kill your livestock, you get paid the cost of that animal by a certain factor. So if a wolf kills one of your cows, you get paid seven times the value of that cow, because it is not actually a huge number statewide. It's not an extremely high cost. I think it was about $270,000 in 2023, the state paid total to ranchers.

Knowing that it is possible that a wolf or any other predator could come take out your livestock, it creates fear, it creates concern. There is this valid thought among ranchers that, ‘Well, hey, I'm not anti-wolf, but I have to protect my own interest. So, as much as I might want wolves around, I can't afford the risk of having one of my cattle or 10 of my cattle killed.’

It's a delicate balance, and in a state that doesn't have a huge population, it's really a chance for even one or two people or one small group to really have a say in the political process and in the future of how conservation moves forward.

ME: If Wyoming is going to benefit from wolves on our landscape, how can we grow that when there are so many limitations?

SD: It's tricky because it's already a really big business. I mean, people spend a lot of money. One strategy that I think is really interesting is there's this organization. They are called WYldlife for Tomorrow. They basically looked at the people who are benefiting from having wolves, and it’s mostly tourism operators. It's hotels and tour guides and those people. There's no official mechanism by which they are actually supporting conservation or supporting wildlife management.

So WYldlife for Tomorrow came out and said, ‘Well, let's change that.’ They now have this coalition of people that's both hunters and ammunition sales and hotels and basically everyone involved who's kind of throwing in money into this pot. And then that money is used for conservation projects, for figuring out, ‘Hey, we're having some wolf conflicts in this area. What can we do to better solve that problem?’ It's voluntary, but it is sort of one of the first organizations that's bringing everyone involved in the debate to the table.

ME: It seems like that must have been part of the motivation behind doing this article. Instead of having a conversation just about, ’Is the species valuable on the landscape intrinsically,’ you ask, ‘Are they valuable economically in some way?’ That seems like it allowed you to elevate the conversation in an interesting way.

SD: Yeah, exactly. You always see the debate and it’s, ‘Conservationists and tree huggers love wolves, and ranchers hate wolves,’ and that's it, right? Black and white. It's not like that. Most people out there are hunters. Most people out there understand the value of conservation and of having species on the landscape.

Ranchers don't hate wolves, and conservationists don't hate ranchers. In fact, a lot of the folks who I spoke to from the Ranchers Association, they even said, ‘We understand the value of having wolves. We know that it brings in money.’

When it comes to having the economic benefits of wolves, it's very difficult to narrow down just wolves, right? Because wolves don't exist in a void. They're part of this bigger food web. And because you have wolves, you have healthier elk populations, and because you have healthier elk populations, you have less disease spreading through the populations, and that leads to fewer rapid ups and downs as populations decline.

It's nearly impossible to say, ‘Okay, well, you have one wolf and it's worth $10,000 a year to the economy.’ But one thing you can look at, that actually Yellowstone and the National Park Service has done, is the surveys of guests who come. They said, ‘Okay, what's your main motivation for coming?’ It's geysers or it's wildlife. And for wildlife, the reason that the wildlife population there is so healthy is because you have this balanced food web. That is because of having mega predators, a.k.a. wolves. So that brings in, the latest survey was like, $80 million a year is contributed to the economy because of having wildlife on the landscape.

We can look at that number and say, ‘Damn, that's good. $80 million a year. Okay, let's take it.’ But you can't isolate it down more than that to say, ‘Wolf watchers spent X, Y, Z amount of money at this hotel.’ I think [that] would start getting so nitty gritty and making so many educated guesses that it would start to be disingenuine.

It's really a hard thing to pin down. As you said, ‘Well, what do we count for the intrinsic value of having wolves? What value do we put on righting a wrong?’ you might say. Wolves are supposed to be here. Just because you can't put a quantitative economic number on that, that doesn't mean it doesn't have value as well.

Melodie Edwards is the host and producer of WPM's award-winning podcast The Modern West. Her Ghost Town(ing) series looks at rural despair and resilience through the lens of her hometown of Walden, Colorado. She has been a radio reporter at WPM since 2013, covering topics from wildlife to Native American issues to agriculture.

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