Billie Siddoway, whose brother, J.C. manages the Siddoway Sheep Company ranch in Terreton, said wolves attacked twice Monday night in different locations than Saturday’s kill near the Palisades Range. Wolves killed four sheep near Dog Creek, south of Hoback, she said. “The second attack,” she said, “was near Sand Creek, north of St. Anthony, where wolves killed a guard dog. We haven’t found enough remains from the dog for verification – just blood and clumps of hair where the fight took place. I suspect the wolves either hauled the dog away or it limped off to die.”
The Great Pyrenees guard dog was the third lost by Siddoway since June, according to a release from the company. It also said it lost “about 250 head of livestock to wolf, bear and coyote depredation” since then, and a horse was lost after falling from a cliff after being spooked by wolves.
The Siddoways likely won’t be compensated for their losses.
“This is a direct loss, it’s just a hit,” said Billie Siddoway.
Dustin Miller, administrator of the Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation, said federal funds from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been drying up over the past couple of years.
Miller said money is slow to trickle down from the feds to the state, and claims from the 2012 grazing season have yet to be paid to compensate ranchers for depredation.
“We have no funding for current-year losses,” said Miller. “It puts Idaho in a difficult situation.”
OSC, which handles claims for wolf depredations, is in the process of getting “old money for old losses,” he said. Those are priorities to be paid, and any money left over could go toward 2013 claims.
The money is supposed to come from Tester funding, so named for Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who helped pass the wolf livestock loss demonstration project, a safety net for compensating ranchers for depredation losses, said Miller.
The five-year program, which came through a 2009 federal omnibus spending bill, was supposed to be funded at $1 million a year for states with wolf and livestock conflicts, Miller said.
The legislation was also intended to fund non-lethal activities to reduce risks of livestock losses to wolves.
But the demostration project’s funding is not in place in the 2013 federal spending bill, he said, and there may not be funding for the program in fiscal year 2013. OSC has only received funding in fiscal year 2010, and additional funding is in question.
“Who knows what the federal government will do?” Miller said. “It’s kind of a struggle. The state has always felt that wolves were imposed on the state by the feds,” and the feds should compensate the state for losses.