"After several days, the body will either melt away or be consumed," says Steve Nadeau, large carnivore biologist with Idaho Fish and Game. Some scavengers don't even care if a wounded animal is dead before they dive in for dinner. That's why the Lords use the words "luck" and "chance" when describing Wolfy's survival. Deb almost stepped on the calf camouflaged by over-grown desert foliage during an early summer walk. The scene told Deb a wolf or wolves had visited the herd.

Had Wolfy succumbed to the attack, the Lords would have been out $800 to $1,200 dollars, not including the vet bills and all the time [Blas] spent nursing the wound. The federally funded Idaho Wolf Depredation Compensation Fund and Defenders of Wildlife both compensate ranchers for such losses, but the Lords and other ranchers figure that for every confirmed wolf kill, five to eight others go undetected. If that's the case, the one confirmed wolf kill and one confirmed wolf attack on the Lord's livestock this year could mean $5,000 to $19,200 in losses. That's a lot of money for a small family operation. Lord says compensation funds cover some of a rancher's losses but, "there's nobody getting free lunches on confirmed wolf kills."

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," Jeff Lord says of the recent attacks that marked the first wolf predations on his livestock. "How are we going to manage them in a way that doesn't drain the public's resources but protects property?" That's a far different question than the kinds of questions ranchers asked when facing livestock losses to hungry wolves. Their answer to the kind of attacks the Lords faced this summer involved mass hunts and poisonings that led to the eventual decline of the gray wolf in the United States.

Predation