The wolf’s return to Washington brings renewal and challenge

written by Daniel O’Neil | photography by David Moskowitz

In July 2008, a gray wolf and several pups loped past a game camera in north-central Washington’s Methow Valley. Such a sighting should have made no news at all, considering how ideal that remote and varied terrain, stocked with plenty of prey, is for wolves. But the gray wolf had been missing from Washington since the 1930s, victim of a crazed campaign of eradication as the state forged a new era. These wolves, however, lived in the twenty-first century, a far different time—now, for instance, they were protected as an endangered species. They also formed part of a breeding pack.

Today, wolf packs exist once again across parts of central and eastern Washington. But much has changed since they last roamed freely here. Human population, development and livestock operations have all grown to prominence, and the wolf must meet this new landscape and scenario on humankind’s terms. Resilient and adaptable, the wolf seems naturally to accept that fact, and given the chance, it will find its place throughout Washington again.

The dilemma with wolves in Washington isn’t so much whether they will be banished once more. The majority of Washingtonians, as well as the government and even many ranchers and hunters, support their continuity. Instead, the issue centers on coexistence. How does Washington adapt to living with an animal whose instinct encroaches upon human interests and industries, and whose behavior we cannot change?

After the wolf slipped back into Washington in 2008, crossing a border both literally and figuratively, more wolves followed, dispersing naturally from recovering wolf populations in British Columbia and Idaho. Wolves were not reintroduced by humans to Washington, nor have they been translocated within the state. For this reason, citizens and the government have accepted the will of nature, for the most part.

A success story for conservation, wolf numbers in Washington had risen steadily until 2023, when a minimum of 254 wolves were tallied. (Wolves are difficult to count accurately.) Then, in 2024, its most-recent count as of this writing, the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife reported a minimum of 230 wolves. Year-to-year fluctuations are normal in species recovery, so biologists are not worried, for now.

At least forty-three packs call Washington home again, mostly in the northeast and southeast corners of the state but also on the eastern flank of the North Cascades. But the number of breeding pairs, composed of a male, female and two pups, which is the metric used for wolf recovery, has fallen from a high in 2022.

Wolves are doing especially well in northeastern Washington, but they have not yet returned west of the Cascade Crest, and local stakeholders have not shown interest in state-sanctioned relocation because nobody wants to assume responsibility for any conflict between wolves and livestock.

A pack of four wolves did form in the mountainous country south of Yakima in 2022, but still-at-large poachers took them out, and by late 2024 the area was empty of wolves again. According to Dr. Subhadeep “Shubh” Bhattacharjee, WDFW’s Wolf and Grizzly Bear Policy Lead, Washington’s main threat to wolf recovery is poaching, or illegal take.

“That’s something that is pushing us back because if that whole pack of four wolves in Klickitat County would have stayed, I think we would have been so close to getting three or four breeding pairs by this year in that area,” Bhattacharjee said.

Still, Bhattacharjee remains optimistic about wolf recovery in Washington. Recent computer modeling done by WDFW in collaboration with the University of Washington provided encouraging results. “Statistical probability predictions show that if we continue the protection management, by the next fifty years we’ll get back almost up to that pre-1930s era,” he said. “Wolves will recolonize the entire state of Washington naturally.”

Washington’s landscape stands to benefit from the wolf’s return. Its interaction with prey—here, primarily deer and elk—helps restore ecosystem balances lost after its removal. Overall, elk and deer herds in Washington wolf country have not declined since the predator’s return. By targeting the sick and feeble of a herd, for example, more forage remains for the herd’s young reproductive members. Removing the weak can also help limit the spread of chronic wasting disease and hoof rot, both of which now affect herds in Washington.

Currently, wolves are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act across Washington, except in the eastern third of the state where recovery has allowed for federal delisting. Yet the state of Washington still considers the wolf an endangered species statewide, so hunting or harassing it is illegal. Eastern Washington and the North Cascades both exceeded regional recovery objectives in 2024, but that same year, following a periodic review, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission maintained the wolf’s endangered status, delaying what ranchers and hunters desire most.

“It’s that down-listing at the state and federal level that we’re looking for,” said Blake Henning, chief conservation officer for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a hunting advocacy group that seeks state-based authority with hunter input for wolf recovery in Washington. “And then a management plan that allows for dealing with private landowner issues, livestock issues. And if we do have [deer and elk] population drops in areas, some crazy stuff is going on, then we have the ability to manage in some way and address that decline.”

In many ways, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (CTCR) already live in a state where the wolf, due to its natural abundance, is no longer protected, and local management applies. Ever since the federal government delisted wolves in Eastern Washington in 2011, the CTCR have been able to manage wolves on their reservation and treaty lands as a sovereign nation.

Initially, the tribes’ biologists figured the reservation’s 2,100 square miles could support only two wolf packs, but today they number seven, and possibly eight. In 2023, a minimum of fifty-four wolves called the reservation home, but that figure dropped to thirty-nine in 2024, due in part to tribal hunting of wolves. The twelve tribes of the CTCR all have different cultural ties to the wolf, and the tribal government allows its members to hunt or trap them year-round with no limits. In 2024, CTCR members killed eighteen wolves.

CTCR chairman Jarred-Michael Erickson, who, as a tribal biologist, has experience managing wolves, honors the significance of wolves once again roving the reservation and beyond. He understands their ecosystem benefits and recognizes the cultural respect for wolves held by the various tribes on the reservation—even the eagle staff in the tribal government chambers is wrapped in a wolf hide.

“I’m glad they’re back, but that also means we need to manage them because we’ve always managed them,” Erickson said. “We’ve always had interactions historically with them, and people have harvested them. But that’s not to say that we don’t want to make sure they’re still on the landscape in healthy numbers. There’s a balance to everything, and we do our best to help maintain that balance, from the human component.”

Erickson said deer and elk populations have remained sufficient to feed tribal members through subsistence hunting, and that due to this plenitude of natural prey, cattle herds on the reservation and bordering non-tribal lands have had few interactions with wolves. Wolf recovery in Washington remains in its early stages, and some tribal members expressed alarm as wolves returned, Erickson noted. But that fear has since subsided.

“Wolves are out there just trying to survive like we are,” Erickson said. “We all need a better understanding. And if people had that, I think there’d be a little less controversy. What our membership has seen over time is that it’s not as bad as everyone thought it was going to be.”

Wolves have resided again in Washington for less than two decades now. After living, and most crucially, raising live-stock without their predatory presence on the landscape for a century, the sudden transition to sharing the land with wolves has caught many in Eastern Washington off guard. Herein lies the state’s real wolf debate.

As wolves returned, public sentiment surveys conducted in 2008 and 2009 showed overwhelming support for wolf recovery in Washington, and more recent surveys have demonstrated a continued majority. In 2011, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission unanimously adopted a Wolf Conservation and Management Plan. While its first goal is to restore the wolf population to self-sustaining levels statewide, its second goal demands a more challenging task: “manage wolf-livestock conflicts in a way that minimizes livestock losses, while at the same time not negatively impacting the recovery or long-term perpetuation of a sustainable wolf population.”

According to WDFW, about 80 percent of Washington’s wolf packs avoid livestock depredation altogether, even though their territories often overlap livestock operations. The wolf’s preferred prey is not cattle or sheep, but wolves will target livestock in certain situations, such as when deer and elk are scarce, when packs have been broken up, or when lax ranching practices present an easy opportunity.

In 2024, WDFW investigators determined that wolves killed seventeen head of cattle, mostly calves, and injured twenty-six. Two more calves were “probably killed by wolves,” testimony to the difficult task of deciding which species—wolf, cougar, coyote, bear, dog—was responsible for killing livestock, and not blaming the subsequent scavengers instead. These investigations weigh heavily because they carry the weight of politics—confirmed wolf kills can lead to state-paid compensation, and to state-sanctioned lethal removal of repeat offenders, a flash point in the entrenched debate between ranching advocates and some conservation groups.

Jay Shepherd is a biologist who has worked for WDFW on such depredation cases. He stressed how careful investigators must be, and how loaded their decisions were for both sides. “It’s hard on everybody,” he said. “It’s hard on the rancher to get turned down for something that … I’ve had them say this to me a lot when I was out there, they’d say, ‘Look, we know you can’t call it a wolf kill, but let’s be clear here, we know what happened.’ So it’s more complicated, I think, than just looking at those numbers.”

Up until 2017, the USDA published self-reported statistics on the mortality of cattle and calves due to predator and nonpredator causes. For the last year tallied, 2015, the report stated 240 cattle killed by predators in Washington. Wolves, then numbering at least ninety in the state, accounted for one-quarter of these deaths, but coyotes accounted for nearly 53 percent of those kills, and cougars for 14.6 percent. (Wolves were only held responsible for 5 percent of calf deaths that year.) The WDFW report for 2015 cites only seven cattle confirmed as wolf-kills.

Compared to the 21,770 cattle reported dead of natural causes in Washington in 2015, even sixty wolf-kills seem insignificant. The state of Washington pays compensation for wolf-killed livestock, but for ranchers it isn’t always about the money—some cattle are kept as breeders, for example, irreplaceable long-term investments. And then there’s the fear.

Cows threatened by the wolf’s presence can miscarry or fail to breed altogether, and calves fail to gain weight when chased by wolves. For ranchers, such outcomes are difficult to bear, both financially and emotionally. After a century of raising livestock on a wolfless land-scape, ranchers have a new unknown to reckon with, and they’re not too pleased about it.

“We understand that the wolf is not going anywhere, but we didn’t ask for this issue,” said Chelsea Hajny, executive vice president of the Washington Cattlemen’s Association. “The ranchers in Washington state that have wolf depredation problems are suffering, and the state has done very little to make inroads on making the problem any better.”

There are two ways to deal with wolves that have taken an interest in livestock. One is to proactively deter them from engaging with cattle or sheep. The other is to kill them.

In 2024, the state of Washington authorized the “lethal removal” of four wolves from packs related to repeated instances of livestock depredation. Another was shot by a rancher in a self-declared case of “caught in the act” depredation. As with livestock losses, these seemingly insignificant figures instantly become disproportionately explosive and divisive.

That same year, among other causes, a cougar killed a wolf, a wolf pack killed another and poachers took out seven. In total, thirty-seven wolves were declared dead. For some conservation groups, even one lethal removal is too many. For ranchers, though, more important than the number killed is the degree of lawfulness to defend their herds themselves.

“We know that it’s not a one-sided argument, and there’s probably multiple solutions, as long as it allows ranchers to have the resources to protect their livelihood,” Hajny said. “That’s where the frustration lies with the rancher, is that the current efforts aren’t working. So how can we be collaborative with all sides and move the needle? That’s all we’re asking—allowing the restrictions in Washington state to be more rancher-friendly so that ranchers have the ability to help themselves.”

As a protected species across the state, ranchers cannot shoot threatening wolves like they can coyotes or cougars. This they would like to change. But until the state feels like wolf recovery is secure in Eastern Washington, only the state can intervene.

WDFW follows its wolf-livestock interaction protocol to determine if chronic or repeated conflict justifies lethal action. “We go for lethal removal recommendation when the non-lethal deterrence is not working,” Bhattacharjee said. “We need to change that depredative behavior of the pack, and that’s why we need lethal removal.”

Some conservation groups, like the Center for Biological Diversity, vehemently oppose such measures and even the nature of the protocol itself. The wolf-livestock interaction protocol includes no rules or regulations around lethal removal or “caught in the act” killings, only guidance that is not enforceable. For instance, the protocol “expects” that livestock operators will employ one or more non-lethal proactive measures to prevent conflicts before demanding lethal removal, but it’s just that—an expectation.

“Having rules in place makes everything transparent, and it makes accountability very clear,” said biologist Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It allows for enforceability, and that’s something that really benefits everybody, no matter where you are around the table.”

Other challenges to lethal removal argue that it doesn’t have any lasting effect, and that it doesn’t even help. Inevitably, other wolf packs will soon enough claim the void. And, according to Weiss, the latest science shows the killing of wolves can actually increase conflicts.

Wolves are a family-structured species. Weiss referenced studies showing how when a multigenerational pack loses wolves, especially breeding members, it is likely to dissolve or to split into smaller packs. Taking down an elk requires five or more wolves, while only one or two can tackle livestock. Also, orphaned pups, lacking the skills to hunt large wild prey, sometimes turn to livestock instead.

“It isn’t just rancher education and awareness, but the agencies as well, to get over this old mindset that the way you resolve a problem with predators is you kill them, when it’s shown not to be effective and when there are so many other tools,” Weiss said.

Deterrence aims to prevent depredation before it happens. Various means are employed, including scare devices, guardian or herding dogs, and wolf-aware animal husbandry and pasturing practices. But the simplest, and most effective, measure is age-old: maintaining a human presence alongside the herd.

On large ranches, and on vast national forest grazing allotments, range riding has proven its weight in gold—ranchers like it, and so do conservationists. Range riders keep one eye on predator activity and the other on the herd. They’re able to haze wolves, avoid areas like wolf denning sites, get sick animals—which attract wolves—off the range and keep the herd intact, which frustrates wolves.

“Wolves really upped the game,” Shepherd said. “You could probably do less lethal removal if you’re patient about it and you had the resources to dump into an allotment and deal with it, but those wolves might go some-where else and cause a problem, or you might have a lot of depredations occur while you’re trying to do that.”

Recognizing the need for improved deterrence, Shepherd started the Northeast Washington Wolf-Cattle Collaborative, a nonprofit that hires range riders. Today Shepherd is the Wolf Program senior manager for Conservation Northwest. As its name implies, Conservation Northwest advocates for environmental causes like wolf recovery. But the Olympia-based group also understands the need to protect ranchers’ livelihoods and has been instrumental in expanding the NWWCC’s reach. “It’s not a success if ranchers don’t accept wolves,” Shepherd said. “Or if they don’t feel like people are trying to help them deal with it.”

Seeking input from all sides of the wolf debate to help guide its management efforts, WDFW created the citizen-led Wolf Advisory Group in 2013. Members are appointed by WDFW to a two-year term, and their interests range from cattle and sheep producers to conservation groups to hunters. WAG is credited by many for bringing Washington’s disparate wolf views together to focus on practical, balanced solutions as the state adapts to the wolf’s renewed presence.

Recently, an independent consultancy convened a national take on WAG called the National Wolf Conversation. Conservation-minded journalist Michelle Nijhuis, who lives in rural Washington, was one of twenty-five attendees. One of her impressions from the NWC is that there’s more common ground than people are led to believe, and it can be found through dialogue.

“I think that it is really valuable for wolf advocates, and the people who live alongside wolves and are worried about their livelihoods, to sit down and talk about what makes sense, what’s going to serve wolves and people in the long term,” Nijhuis said. “And if you can build trust among people, I really do think it’s possible to come up with solutions that neither side would have come up with on their own.”

The gray wolf seems to be teaching us about ourselves—about our fears, our intolerances, our prejudices, our violence and our lack of understanding—and about each other. By asking post-colonial society to live with the wolf, the wolf dilemma challenges Washingtonians from across the state and from both sides of the urban-rural divide to better coexist. It’s no coincidence that such a family-oriented species as the wolf would inspire such reconciliation.