Leading the pack in wolf management [View all]

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https://www.cmich.edu/news/article/pages/wolf-management-research.aspx



Nonlethal ways to manage wolves

From about 2003-11, Gehring and his team explored three ways to keep wolves from killing livestock. Here is what they learned:

Electrical barriers: The team trapped wolves in Wisconsin to fit them with radio tags and collars for aversive conditioning. In the same way systems such as Invisible Fence use mild electric shocks to train dogs to stay in a yard, wolves were trained to stay away from farmers' pastures. Because wolves are pack animals, Gehring said, conditioning just a few individuals can keep an entire pack away from grazing land: "They learn, and they transfer information."
Fluttering flags: They erected "fladry" — string fencing with strips of fabric tied every couple of feet to flap in the breeze — to create barriers wolves won't cross. Gehring said on one Upper Peninsula farm, wolves had killed 78 lambs in a year. "We came in and we put fladry up, and for the next three years they had no losses because they had no wolves coming into their pastures."
Puppy power: They supplied selected Upper Peninsula farmers with Great Pyrenees puppies that would grow to become livestock-guarding dogs. Gehring and his students would deliver puppies in the U.P. during their spring break, and grad students would offer technical support throughout the summer. In four years of the grant-funded project, wolf attacks at the farms fell to zero. Gehring continued the dog program for four years after the grant ended.
Their projects earned international respect. In a 2016 review, the scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment said two of Gehring's studies met the "gold standard" for scientific rigor, the only studies to receive that designation out of a dozen studies it considered worldwide.