Big & bad

Mexican wolves attack adult cows, but they usually prefer calves. One will work to separate a calf from its mother, chase it down, then bite at its flanks and hindquarters—literally eating it alive—until the wounded animal falls to its death.

Catron County Commissioner Audrey McQueen has learned that’s what happened yesterday to yet another calf on the Harriet Ranch near Datil, N.M. It’s the seventh head of cattle killed by wolves on the property in four months. McQueen is riding hard toward the ranch in a brand-new Suburban, her hand rifling through a bag of honey-flavored cough drops. She’s sniffling, too, but cold or no cold, she’s going. The discovery of the calf’s remains prompted a meeting between frustrated ranchers and officials from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s set to start at half past noon and promises to be heated.

As she drives, McQueen gazes out the window at endless high plains, the sort that have informed her perspective since she was born. They are brown with drought. Such conditions would normally occupy the thoughts of McQueen, a grass-dependent cattle rancher, big game hunting guide, and nine-time world champion elk caller, but it’s the wolves, not the drought, that now keep her up at night. “They are a plague,” she says simply, her eyes never leaving the road.

The Mexican wolf is also a highly protected endangered species.

Moments later McQueen’s Suburban rolls onto Harriet Ranch, a fourth-­generation cattle operation which, at 53,000 acres, covers more territory than the city of Miami. She greets a group of fellow ranchers by name and handshake. They stand beneath a towering windmill on hard-packed ground, their flatbed pickups and duallies forming a ring around them. Near the front, Brady McGee, coordinator of the government’s Mexican wolf recovery project, explains what they already know. He has an obligation to reach the 320 mark—320 Mexican wolves in the wild—before the animal is no longer considered endangered. The Catron County ranchers listen patiently, but the Catron County ranchers are not sympathetic.

They are, after all, at the epicenter of this clash between beast and man. In April, the county issued an emergency declaration calling the growing number of wolves a threat to public health and safety.

Laws rightly seek to preserve endangered species, but in this case, it’s an apex predator, not a spotted owl or silvery minnow, that’s getting government protection. Whose rights should prevail? Man and his interests, or an animal hunted nearly to extinction?

TWO HOURS NORTH of Datil, visitors at the Albuquerque BioPark Zoo can see Mexican wolves up close. Children press their faces against plexiglass openings in a tall wooden fence and scan a large, shaded enclosure. They shriek when they spot one wolf lying near a smattering of logs, then another two at the right corner darting through some brush.

Visitors can also read a sign nearby that explains the Canis lupus baileyi, with its grizzled coat and rounded ears, can weigh up to 80 pounds. That’s smaller than the gray wolf roaming Yellowstone, and larger than a common coyote. Mexican wolves were once a fixture of the Southwestern landscape, but their presence caused problems for the cattle industry that took root in the 1800s. By 1976, only seven Mexican wolves were believed alive, which led to their listing under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Because the wolf’s natural territory crosses borders, the United States initiated an out-of-the-norm binational captive breeding program with Mexico to save them from extinction.

Two decades passed before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released the first captive Mexican wolves into Arizona and New Mexico. The original recovery goal was 100 wolves in the wild. In 2017, that figure was upped to 320, a number to be sustained over eight years. A 2024 population survey revealed a minimum of 286 Mexican wolves distributed across Arizona and New Mexico.

Advocates say the massive effort to repopulate Mexican wolves, costing taxpayers more than $74 million since the program’s inception, is imperative because they are a keystone species. Keystone species are animals that have a significant effect on the ecosystem, even though their numbers are low. Mexican wolves keep elk and deer on the move, preventing them from standing near water and eating or trampling all the aquatic plants. Those plants, along with bushes and trees, keep the water cool. Trout need cold water to reproduce. It’s a whole-system effect.

Bryan Bird is a conservationist with the organization Defenders of Wildlife. Standing near the wolf exhibit in Albuquerque, he bends to watch the animals through the fence. Bird is a slender man with a warm smile, and he admits he’s never seen a Mexican wolf in the wild, even though he’s been trying to for 25 years. That hasn’t hampered his activism, though. “I speak for the wolves,” Bird says.

Part of that, Bird maintains, is being candid about conflict with ranchers in places like Catron County. He’s quick to explain that while most ranches have a small deeded property as their base, they are usually tied to tens of thousands of acres of land leased from the government. The ranches need huge tracts to feed their cattle because vegetation in Western states is so sparse.

“Ranchers are business people, and they’re raising livestock on federal public lands,” Bird emphasizes. “The federal government manages that land and has to consider all the values. Not only the value of the grass for these private cattle ranchers but the animals that live there, the water that comes off that land, the clean air that land produces, whatever it might be. It’s a multiple-use system.”

Audrey McQueen agrees with Bird’s assessment but adds a caveat. It’s a multiple-use system that benefits from stewarding ranchers. “We keep up the waters and manage herds. If we don’t have cattle grazing our forests, our forests will burn.”

McQueen doesn’t want to rid the landscape of wolves, she just wants better wolf management. She thinks putting radio collars on every wolf, rather than just a portion, would enable an accurate count. Many ranchers believe government estimates are low and the recovered number may actually already have hit the benchmark.

Wolf recovery staff use collars to gather information on pack size, territories, den locations, and repro­duction. Collars can also track wolf movement—or lack of movement. A conventional radio collar is programmed to emit a mortality signal if the wolf does not move after a certain amount of time. Recovery staff are quick to investigate.

A member of the Mexican wolf recovery team measures the teeth of a wolf captured during an annual population survey. Arizona Game and Fish Department via AP

When Buster Green, a rancher who lives in Catron County near Quemado, shot and killed a collared wolf, he reported it immediately. Authorities confiscated his gun the next day.

It’s been a week since that incident, and inside the main house at the Greens’ family ranch, Buster’s 83-year-old mother, Karolie Green, is working on dinner. There’s a pot roast in the oven and green beans in a pressure cooker that’s starting to hiss. The pressure cooker was a wedding gift in 1959. “It’s lost the top handle, but it still works,” Karolie says, laughing. She’s standing beneath a log ceiling made of hand-hewn Ponderosa pine, part of the original dwelling on land her husband’s family homesteaded more than 100 years ago.

Karolie remembers when authorities reintroduced Mexican wolves in 1998. “We protested, and they bused people in from the city. We said if you want the wolves, put them in your backyard. But they said oh, no. We can’t. People live there.” Karolie shakes her head at the memory. “What are we?”

She’s lived long enough to see the results. Wolves have killed their cows. They terrorized and injured their horses, which had to be euthanized. A wolf even stalked her grandchild’s horse for more than a mile as the 12-year-old girl rode in a remote part of the ranch. Now Buster must face the consequences of shooting a federally protected animal he thought was a coyote threatening his pets. Killing a Mexican wolf can result in criminal penalties of up to $50,000 and a year in jail.

“The problem is, we have a society that’s been raised on Disney shows, where these animals talk and have feelings, and that isn’t the case,” says Buster, a man whose day starts at 4 a.m. “We’re dealing with wild animals, pack animals. They don’t just kill to eat. They kill for the fun of it.”

Buster points to a neighbor down the road who woke up one morning and found seven of his calves dead. At first the neighbor thought they had gotten into some kind of poisonous weed, their bodies were so unmarred. “It wasn’t until they shaved the calves that they found bite marks and knew wolves killed them,” Buster explains. Killed them, but didn’t eat them.

That “savage side of life,” as author Nate Blakeslee detailed in his best-selling book American Wolf, is only one part of a wolf’s existence. Blakeslee wrote about an alpha female known as O-Six as though she were a character in a novel, taking readers into her world in Yellowstone National Park as she defends territory, seeks a mate, nurses pups, and dens. Still, O-Six must hunt, and she hunts well.

As Christians would acknowledge, wolves merely do what God created them to do. How then should man exercise dominion over them?

Audrey McQueen (fifth from left) and other ranchers meet with Brady McGee (second from left) at Harriet Ranch. Photo by Kim Henderson

WHEN TALK TURNS to Mexican wolves in cattle country, the word depredation comes up a lot. The work of confirming wolf depredations, or kills, falls on employees like Shawn Menges, depredation investigator for Catron County. Menges is a stout, serious man. Yesterday his job involved a newborn calf that barely lived six hours. Today, it’s an older cow. Each time, Menges collaborates with an investigator from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study the carcass, using livestock clippers to remove hair and calipers to measure the distance between canines in the bites. “For a Mexican wolf, it’s going to be in the high 30s. For a younger wolf, 45, 46 millimeters.”

The death of a cow can be as much as a $4,000 loss for ranchers, with financial reverberations felt for years. The operation not only loses that cow but its future offspring as well. Capital then goes toward buying replacements, rather than herd development.

A confirmed wolf depredation, however, means money for ranchers. That’s part of the wolf recovery program—reimbursing ranchers for their losses. Standards of evidence for wolf depredations changed in 2023, making it harder to get compensated. But wolf advocates like Bryan Bird believe a stringent, scientific approach is necessary because cattle die for a variety of reasons—other predators, health conditions, drought. “It’s important that we have evidence-based standards to ensure our taxpayer money is being spent correctly,” he argues.

Bird also questions ranchers with losses sitting on reimbursement boards. Last year, Audrey McQueen and two others faced scrutiny from the New Mexico State Ethics Commission for their roles as members of the County Livestock Loss Authority, an entity that in 2024 paid out $190,000 in depredations and conflict avoidance—things like buying guard dogs, changing calving time to when there are elk calves the wolves can eat instead, and providing fladry, flags that flap in the wind. While the commission found that McQueen had not benefited inappropriately from any of her official acts, it did order that she abstain from any future compensation votes related to her ranch.

And that’s not the only trouble McQueen has faced. The mother of four received death threats after she and other county commissioners in April voted for the emergency declaration because of the wolves. The suspect, an Oregon resident who mentioned two wolf advocacy groups in his texts and calls, is now in jail. McQueen says she wasn’t worried about herself so much. “But my children drive an hour and a half to school one way, and they drive back roads. I wondered, do I drive the kids to school with a gun every day?”

The arrest shocked many Catron County residents, including Melynda Walraven, a petite 64-year-old with highlighted, edgy hair. Walraven fears that if wolf advocates have their way, ranchers like her may lose their way of life. Wolf tracks around her house mean her grandchildren can’t do what her kids grew up doing, things like making tents on the trampoline and spending the night outside. She misses a church friend who went out of business as wolves slowly picked off his cattle. “He moved to the city and died not long after that, because ranching was all he’d ever done,” she says.

The Green family tells about their encounters with wolves. Photo by Kim Henderson

Walraven admits that for years she wasn’t really concerned about wolves. They were a problem in other parts of the county. Then she found one of her own cows dead, its udder and rectum eaten away. Coyotes, Walraven points out, don’t do that. Wolves have a penchant for soft tissue.

Walraven was later astonished to discover wolf advocates feeding a pack on her leased land. “It looked like a roll of bologna. They told us it was horse meat and beef.”

That’s a big problem, according to Catron County Extension Agent Tracy Drummond. The feeding. The handling. The wolves no longer fear people. Drummond experienced this himself when a wolf drifted, rather than ran, away from him. He blames the recovery program. “The wolves see a white pickup like the ones from the Fish and Wildlife Service, and they start salivating. They associate people with food.”

The wolves’ habituation to people is the reason Drummond’s wife no longer goes walking. It’s also the reason area bus stops have small wooden shelters for school children. If the Mexican wolf program is so important to the citizens of the United States, Drummond asks, why do the people in Catron County have to carry it on their backs?

Melynda Walraven wonders about the safety of her cows. Photo by Kim Henderson

Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar hopes they won’t have to carry it much longer. In June he introduced a bill that would remove the Mexican wolf from both the threatened and endangered species lists. The legislation cites recovery goals met and surpassed in the United States. At the same time, it contends that goals linked to Mexico through the binational agreement can never be reached because of failing conservation efforts in that country.

That’s what the latest evaluation released by the Fish and Wildlife Service indicated. It reported Mexico had zero collared wolves alive in the wild in 2023, mostly due to illegal poisoning.

The crowd at the May 22 meeting at Harriet Ranch brought up that binational agreement. Even Brady McGee agreed it’s a problem. “You are correct. Mexico is a challenge,” the Fish and Wildlife Service coordinator acknowledged. And that wasn’t his only con­cession. Unexpectedly, McGee also promised a wolf removal order to the dead calf’s owner, Louis Sanders.

Later, McGee would say he felt ambushed that day.

Louis Sanders saw it differently.

“I was able to tell Brady and his team that I wouldn’t allow them to haze the wolf onto my neighbor’s property, and I wouldn’t allow them to use a food cache to try to draw it onto my neighbor’s property. As a cowboy, you don’t give your problems to your neighbor. You tend to it yourself.”

But even a removal order can’t solve the problem. The wolves that wreaked havoc at Harriet Ranch appear to have moved on. For weeks, Sanders used night vision equipment to look for them, but he never saw them again.