A wolf in Yellowstone joins magpies in feasting upon an elk carcass. Throughout the West, dead animals attract scavengers. In cattle country, experience has shown that conflicts between ranchers and predators can be reduced when dead cattle and sheep, which can attract wolves, bears and mountain lions are removed from rangeland. Photo courtesy Jim Peaco/NPS
by Katie Hill
Late March whiteout conditions disabled eyes from discerning where the flat ground of the Big Hole valley stopped and the snowy sky began. Cattle were only visible as fuzzy black masses dotting the frozen landscape. The occasional collection of fenceposts and barbed wire rose out of the monotone vista, reminding drivers where not to go as they navigated the roads.
There wasn’t much potential for any head-on collision. The early spring snowstorm left the state highways practically deserted.
John Costa approached a monstrous dump truck, parked under the cozy weight of the precipitation that was quickly accumulating. Both Costa and the truck are employed by the Big Hole Watershed Committee (BHWC) to pick up livestock carcasses from Big Hole cattle ranchers during spring calving season, which runs from March to May. Costa then returns the animals to the BHWC carcass composting facility, a hill of wood chips and bones outside of a Montana Department of Transportation maintenance garage four miles south of Wisdom.
Carcass disposal, instead of leaving dead calves to decompose and be ingested by scavengers? Yes, carcass disposal, one of the latest management practices being adopted by livestock producers to prevent potential conflicts with predators. The irony is that by properly tending to dead livestock it helps keep those predators alive
Organizations with livestock carcass removal programs like the BHWC and the Blackfoot Challenge are trusted with more than just handling this unfortunate byproduct of animal husbandry. Ranchers who use the programs also trust the organizations to keep their identities and death loss numbers completely confidential. Without this commitment to anonymity, ranchers might not choose to use the composting programs in the first place.
Spring calving season brings with it an increase in livestock death loss resulting from birthing complications, disease and predation, and livestock carcass composting has become a popular way for ranchers to keep predators off of their land. Ranchers hand carcasses off to the organizations for safe disposal instead of leaving free meals out in the open, which lures predators near the rest of the vulnerable herd.
Similar to how medical practitioners comply with patient confidentiality laws, confidentiality of livestock death loss numbers is standard for an industry marked by private, familial business ventures. Costa hopped up into the dump truck, on loan from the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, and went off to see his only patient of the day.
Big Hole rancher Dean Peterson rides with his cows and calfs.
The dump truck shuddered down the road into Jackson and turned onto a long muddy driveway. Other than the hundreds of cattle, some of them just a few days old, a smiling face driving a bucket loader was the only sign of life. Costa followed the bucket loader past the house and a lineup of old Chevrolets, parking the truck in front of a small lump covered in snow.
The bucket loader clasped onto the lump like a claw machine in a Walmart breezeway, and extracted the mangled bodies of two or three black and white calves. Tangled limbs and heads made an exact body count impossible. With what seemed like gentle respect reserved for the deceased, the bucket loader lowered the bodies into the dump truck and lightly released them, making a sound barely louder than the snowflakes hitting the ground.
The bucket loader’s operator was not the rancher who owned the property, but a ranch employee. Costa never mentioned the ranch owner’s name, but did clarify that the owner had signed off on an extra observer being present for the pickup.
Costa said that despite the neighborly nature of the Big Hole valley residents, the towns of the region could harbor some fast-acting rumor mills. Privacy comes at a premium, even in tight-knit neighborhoods.
“In these small communities, it’s like a flood,” Costa said. “But don’t get me wrong; everyone looks out for each other. You have to in places like this.”
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The Big Hole sits in the northernmost portion of Beaverhead County, which has a county-wide population of around 9,500 people. Wisdom is in the northern part of the valley, and as of the 2010 Census, was home to 98 residents. Jackson, an even smaller community, is in the southern part of the Big Hole. Cattle ranching and hay production are the dominating industries here; Beaverhead County has boasted the largest county-wide cattle inventory in Montana in past years.
Beaverhead County is a pivotal place when it comes to promoting bio-regional thinking in wildlife conservation. It is a halfway point between the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Bitterroot Ecosystem via what is known as the High Divide. Grizzlies are moving southward out of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem at the same time that bears in the Greater Yellowstone region are moving northward. At some point they will meet and then later, at some indeterminate time in the future, the convergence will mean interconnected populations of bears which will be another cornerstone in bruin recovery.
Beaverhead County is a pivotal place when it comes to promoting bio-regional thinking in wildlife conservation. It is a halfway point between the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Bitterroot Ecosystem via what is known as the High Divide. It has also in recent years boasted the largest countywide cattle inventory in Montana.
Beaverhead County is a place where agrarians are trying to co-exist with predators that were eliminated by others in their communities decades ago to make public and private lands safer for cattle. Today ranchers are getting help from scientists and conservationists trying to keep conflict to a minimum.
Rancher Jim Hagenbarth
Many of the ranches have stayed in the same families for generations. Both sides of Jim Hagenbarth’s family tree are rooted in ranching in Montana and Idaho, and have been there since the 1870s. His family runs a cow-calf and yearling operation that moves between the Big Hole in the late fall to early spring and southeastern Idaho in the late spring and summer months.
Hagenbarth, 71, is the vice-chairman of the Big Hole Watershed Committee’s governing board. He is widely respected in the Montana ranching and wildlife management communities, and is involved in the Montana Stockgrowers Association and the Montana Board of Livestock. He has also been instrumental in working groups for bison management and sage grouse restoration, and considers composting a great way to limit human-wildlife conflict.
While grizzly bears aren’t a major source of predation in the Big Hole yet, any rancher will say they’re encroaching on to the landscape. Wolves are already prevalent in the region, and the Big Hole predator lifestyle seems to be a leisurely one. “Predators right now generally have a smorgasbord of food along the highways and on the ranches…but we want to make them honest predators and put them back to work,” Hagenbarth says. “Composting is easy once it’s started and understood.”
But when ranchers let an external organization handle the composting process, they are also revealing evidence of what they might consider poor job performance. “Of course a lot of people were sensitive to owning up to the amount of loss they had, because it reflects on their operation,” Hagenbarth said. “I can see why it would bother some people. We’re sensitive to not being able to perform our obligation of good husbandry to those animals.”
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Fourth generation Upper Big Hole rancher Dean Peterson said livestock death loss is an unavoidable and ubiquitous truth of the industry.
“Every stockowner will lose stock no matter how many hours a day they work or how hard they try or how many vaccines they give,” Peterson said. “That’s just part of raising livestock; you lose it.”
Peterson is a director on the BHWC governing board and producer with the Peterson Brothers Cattle Company in the Upper Big Hole. The family name has supported the BHWC since its establishment in 1995, when Peterson’s father was a founding member.
He said that even though livestock death loss is something that every rancher must confront, it is also a touchy subject that is largely avoided in conversation. “There are people who you ask ‘how was your calving season,’ and they’ll say ‘oh good, we never lost an animal,’ and you know that’s not true,” Peterson notes. “It’s their pride not wanting to talk about it. So you just don’t go there.”
Peterson believes that BHWC’s commitment to protecting privacy when handling carcass removal is one of the motivating factors behind the willingness of ranchers to use the composting program. At the time of the program’s inception in 2017, Peterson said one of the questions raised by ranchers was whether anyone else would find out how many carcasses BHWC picked up from each property, but nerves were eased with the assurance of confidentiality.
“It’s no one’s business how many carcasses get picked up from your house or my house,” Peterson said. “We just want to remove the attractant. We don’t care how many come from each place. That’s not important.”
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Dr. Seth Wilson faced similar challenges when trying to get the Blackfoot Challenge carcass removal program off the ground in 2003. Wilson was the Blackfoot Challenge’s wildlife coordinator at the time, and is now in his first year as its executive director.
Biologist Seth Wilson helping to pioneer new ways of resolving livestock-predator conflicts.
The Blackfoot Challenge is a working group that brings together stakeholders from across the Blackfoot River watershed, a largely undeveloped expanse that stretches from just east of Missoula to Helena. Like the Big Hole, ranching is the primary industry of the region, and predation is a prominent issue.
Wilson was underwhelmed by the number of carcasses the program picked up in its first calving season, and set to work trying to fix the lack of participation. The solution turned out to be a more robust commitment to the protection of rancher anonymity. “It’s part of respecting each other as neighbors and not wanting to poke fingers for fear of being perceived as deficient in animal husbandry,” Wilson said. “A very important aspect of the ranching culture is not wanting to disrespect each other’s privacy.”
The program’s driver started picking carcasses up from decentralized drop-off locations, and ranchers were told to remove ear tags from the animals before leaving them there. Both of these measures, combined with Wilson’s status as an independent contractor, reassured area ranchers that their privacy would be protected. It worked.
“For two or three years, participation really increased. It’s a huge tri-county project now, and in a given year probably 100 ranchers are taking part,” Wilson said.
The neutral drop-off tactic has since transitioned into on-property pickups, but the idea helped the program’s participation reach the expectations Wilson originally had. They now pick up around 500 carcasses a year.
Tana Nulph, associate director of the BHWC, said that their carcass composting program has handled 299 animals since its first pickup in 2015. The number of animals processed annually has increased slightly every year, and the number of participating ranchers has hovered steadily around nine. Last year’s harsh early spring produced 123 of those carcasses, but this year’s mild temperatures have kept the count at 53.
The BHWC pickup service ran through the end of May, which means Costa might have removed the 300thcarcass before spring calving season was over. But with any luck, that milestone will wait until next year.
And when it does happen, carcass 300 will be one less free meal for a wolf, mountain lion, or even a grizzly bear. And 300’s owner can rest easy knowing their identity was taken to the grave. Or, at least, to the compost pile.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Watch brief video below produced by National Geographic on Malou Anderson-Ramirez, who was featured in the recent MoJo story by Jessianne Castle. On film, Anderson-Ramirez discusses why managing livestock carcasses matters in Montana's Tom Miner Basin.
About Katie Hill
Katie Hill is a freelance environmental journalist and Master’s student in the Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism program at the University of Montana. Originally from Canton, Connecticut, she got her Bachelor’s degree in journalism with a minor in environmental studies from Emerson College in Boston in 2018. She now lives in Missoula and plans to graduate from UM in 2021.
