Low-stress herding as a coexistence strategy

2018/2/5 | Wyoming: Sublette Co.

Low-stress herding as a coexistence strategy

By Matt Barnes

I spent the last several years working on livestock-carnivore coexistence in the Northern Rockies, with the nonprofit People and Carnivores. My interest is in ranching becoming more resilient, and seeing cattle, bears, and wolves alive. There’s no silver bullet, but I believe a strategy begins with making predation losses less likely. The conservation community has come up with tools to keep potential predators away from livestock, but most of those tools are gadgets that, because they rely on novelty, really only work on small scales and in the short term. Out on the range, the best strategies are probably those that both reduce the likelihood of encounters with predators and increase the likelihood of livestock surviving those encounters. That may sound like common sense, but that also means a shift from tools focused on the wild animals that we can’t control to the domestic animals that we can at least manage.

Predation risk can’t be reduced to a single factor, but in my experience one factor stands out: the distribution of livestock over the landscape. Livestock scattered all over the landscape are inherently vulnerable. If we can ride the range and find a few cattle here and there or just about anywhere, so can a bear or a wolf. And that bear or wolf can probably pick off a calf in an isolated group with relative impunity, the evidence disappearing before anyone stumbles across it.

It just so happens that the art of rangeland grazing management is also very much about the distribution of livestock in space and time. In my experience many grazing problems are distribution problems, and can be solved with strategic grazing management, whether that’s done by planned rotational grazing using cross-fences, or by low-stress herding [1]. But most rangeland pastures are simply too large, especially on public lands, to accomplish this only by cross-fencing.

Yes, of course, I’ve heard cowboys say they spent all day moving cattle just to have the cattle beat them back to the truck. That’s what happens if the cattle experience it as stressful, which they will if they are not paired up, chased out of an area they like to one they don’t, or a host of other reasons why interactions with humans might be disturbing to the bovine mind. The question isn’t whether herding works, just like the question isn’t whether rotational grazing works. The question is how to do it well enough that it can be effective. And as far as I can tell, that means low-stress herding, which has many other benefits.

Ranchers and range riders have done this before, including herding projects in western Montana, with the Rodear Initiative at North Meadow Creek in the Tobacco Root Mountains [2], and with Whit Hibbard just west of the Continental Divide in northwestern Montana [3,4,5], where the entire herd was kept together and we didn’t lose any cattle. But in those cases we didn’t have a population of grizzlies already conditioned to kill cattle. Other herding projects in western Montana also appear to have reduced vulnerability to predation, including one led by the Tom Miner Basin Association (which was also supported by People and Carnivores) [6].

Among the other benefits of a concentrated herd being moved around the landscape strategically, it reduces the scale at which people need to work on any given day. That means that livestock guardian animals can be more effective (after all, if a range rider can’t ride out and see all of the cattle in a day, a dog can’t either). That also means a higher probability of finding any carcasses quickly enough to have them investigated and compensated. The proportion of carcasses found seems to depend on a combination of landscape scale and search effort, with an older case study in Idaho indicating that only one out of seven or eight were found [7], but a more recent study in steep and rocky eastern Arizona finding that all or nearly all carcasses could be found [8]. The studies didn’t compare management approaches, but this would lead one to hypothesize that, in a large-scale operation with numerous predation losses, given a dedicated rider, shrinking the scale of daily riding might lead to a several-fold increase in the proportion of carcasses found.

Here’s a short film, produced by People and Carnivores about a range rider practicing low-stress herding, as part of their library of short films about coexistence tools. In this case, I worked with the range rider on part of the largest grazing allotment in the West, in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, where there are lots of grizzly bears and wolves and more than a few dead cattle. This allotment is thought to have one of the highest, quite possibly the highest, predation rates of all cattle allotments in the West, with most carcasses not being found [9], even if the total extent of losses to predation is debated [10]. The project was on one of the allotment’s four pasture systems (essentially sub-allotments), each of which has three or four pastures. That’s certainly better than season-long grazing, but not enough to achieve the kind of rotation that I would call strategic grazing management, considering that the pastures are large enough that a typical grazing period is about a month long. So the permittees agreed to try herding in one pasture system [11].

Herding as a coexistence tool: a short film produced by People and Carnivores, directed by Jayme Dittmar with videography by James Q. Martin.

Ultimately, in this case, there were still predation losses, and we could not determine whether the approach worked or not. It might be because the strategy only works if the local grizzlies aren’t already conditioned to kill cattle. Or it might be because the range rider successfully found a significantly higher proportion of carcasses than did riders in nearby pasture systems (which are also more densely forested than the area shown in this film). Unfortunately we could not measure that effect, and its magnitude would determine whether the project worked or not. But the ranchers know, based on missing cattle at the end of the season, that across the whole allotment, most carcasses are not being found.

References

1. Barnes, M. 2015. Livestock management for coexistence with large carnivores, health land and productive ranches [white paper]. People and Carnivores, Bozeman, Montana.

2. Gillette, B. 2013. High stock density grazing can help prevent predation losses in livestock. The Stockman GrassFarmer 13(5): 1,3-4,7.

3. Lundquist, L. 2013. Herding experiments could aid pastures, predators. Bozeman Daily Chronicle 2013(9/17).

4. Barnes, M. Low-stress herding improves herd instinct, facilitates strategic grazing management. Stockmanship Journal 4(1): 34-43.

5. Barnes, M., and W. Hibbard. 2016. Strategic grazing management using low-stress herding and night penning for animal impact. Stockmanship Journal 5(2): 57-71.

6. Zaranek, H. 2016. Stockmanship and livestock predation mitigation. Stockmanship Journal 5(2): 34-46.

7. Oakleaf, J., et al. 2003. Effects of wolves on livestock calf survival and movements in central Idaho. Journal of Wildlife Management 67(2): 299-306.

8. Breck, S., et al. 2011. Domestic calf mortality and producer detection rates in the Mexican wolf recovery area: Implications for livestock management and carnivore compensation schemes. Biological Conservation 144(2): 930-936.

9. Sommers, A., et al. Quantifying economic impacts of large-carnivore depredation on bovine calves. Journal of Wildlife Management 74(7): 1425-1434.

10. Hebblewhite, M. Unreliable knowledge about economic impacts of large carnivores on bovine calves. Journal of Wildlife Management 75(8): 1724-1730.

11. Koshmrl, M. 2016. Stemming grizzly bloodshed: Keeping the cattle bunched up is being tried in the Upper Green basin. Jackson Hole News & Guide 2016(7/13).