When a handful of collared wolves from the Beyem Seyo pack were finally taken out of Sierra Valley last fall, rancher Rick Roberti thought maybe the worst was behind them.
The four wolves — three collared and one pup — were tied by DNA evidence to 90% of the confirmed calf kills in his area of Northern California. As soon as those wolves were gone, the killing stopped, he says.
However, the respite hasn’t brought him much peace.
“We’re pretty much done,” he stresses. “You can’t just put us in a corner and say, ‘Take it, do these stupid things, and sooner or later, maybe something will happen [to alleviate wolf pressure].’”
As president of the California Cattlemen’s Association, Roberti isn’t just speaking for his own family operation. He’s carrying stories from ranchers up and down the state who say wolf policy is being driven more by politics and perception than by on-the-ground reality.
$2.5 Million Spent, One Pack Removed — But the Pressure Migrates
The state of California poured $2.5 million into trying to manage that one Sierra Valley pack, but it didn’t work, Roberti says.
“It proves the point that if these wolves really are habituated and want to kill you, you can’t stop them,” he adds.
Only when the four collared wolves were lethally removed did the confirmed kills stop in his immediate area. That, Roberti argues, raises tough questions about how long agencies can rely almost exclusively on non-lethal tools while wolves lose their fear of people and livestock.
He’s quick to point out that while the wolf situation in his area has improved, the predator pressure has simple migrated.
With cows turned out on U.S. Forest Service permits and private timber country, much of the summer grazing now happens where evidence is easily lost.
“Some areas this time of year don’t know exactly what’s happening because the cattle are in the mountains, in the timber, it’s hard,” he explains. “By the time they get there, the bears and the coyotes following the wolves around have it cleaned up, so there’s nothing left to investigate.”
Delayed Data, Lost Evidence and ‘Hidden’ Depredations
On paper, confirmed depredations might appear manageable. On the ground, Roberti says, the numbers don’t capture what’s really happening.
GPS collars on wolves could be a powerful tool, but ranchers say they rarely get that information when it could actually protect calves.
“Those pings come in way too late,” Roberti says. “We can’t get them to give us those pings and tell us the wolves are in our herds or the wolves are here. They won’t give us that until after it’s all done.”
By then, scavengers often have done their work.
“A lot of the investigations say we don’t know, there’s not enough evidence, so it doesn’t go as a wolf kill,” Roberti says.
In Sierra County, local officials recently found a partial workaround. Paul Roen, a Sierra County rancher and chair of the Sierra County Board of Supervisors, helped secure a data-sharing agreement with the state that routes collar data directly to a designated sheriff’s deputy.
“We signed it about three weeks ago and finally got access,” Roen explains. “If there’s a cluster or if a wolf is in a location within the last 24 hours, the sheriff can notify the affected producers to go out, check, haze or investigate. It’s still delayed, but at least it gives producers a fighting chance.”
Even with notifications in place, Roen says the pressure in the valley remains constant.
“Our cattle are on private ground all summer, and we’re calving right now,” Roen says. “We know we have at least five pups in a local pack that the state has confirmed but hasn’t yet identified in their reports. Just last night, we had four wolves in the valley that we had to bump out.”
Last year, when pups came out of the den, Roberti says wolves began focusing on smaller, younger calves — harder to find and quicker to consume.
“They practice teaching their pups how to kill,” he says. “There’s not a lot of meat on [a calf], so a lot of those kills if you didn’t see the birds flying on it, you’d never know it was there.”
In the valley, the ranchers have learned to look up.
“We have such a raven population that it was easy to see the birds eating on something,” he notes. “But if you’re in the mountain, you’re on thousands of acres. You don’t find them.”
Walking Away from Mountain Permits
For generations, summer grazing in the mountains has been the backbone of California cow-calf outfits — a tradition some ranchers are now abandoning.
“We’ve decided not to go to our grazing permit in the mountains because we can’t take that loss,” Roberti says.
Recent years of decent valley moisture have allowed them to keep cows closer to home for now, but that shift comes with tradeoffs: Heavier pressure on private ground, less flexibility in drought years and the potential loss of long-held federal permits.
Roberti says ranchers in other Western states provide a troubling preview.
“People have given up their permits in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho,” he notes. “They’ve chased the wolves now back out of the valleys, but they’re back up in the hills. [Calves ] are fair game for wolves because they are so small. There’s just not enough for [wolves] to eat in the Western states anymore.”
That pressure isn’t just on cattle.
“Our deer herd is the next to go on the endangered species list because they’re just not managing very well,” Roberti says.
If grazing and hunting both suffer, rural communities feel the impact.
“It’s going to hurt our local economy if we lose our grazing permits, if we lose our hunting and camping and the experience why people come here to spend a little money in our small towns,” he says. “It’s a big deal.”
Legal Handcuffs and a Narrow Definition of Self-Defense
While wolf numbers and range expand, Roberti says California’s legal framework leaves ranchers almost no latitude to protect their livestock.
“The law says only in this case — and the case is basically if you’re being attacked by a wolf — can you do anything to the wolf,” he explains. “We should have the right to protect our private property. We should have the right to protect our livestock, and we shouldn’t go to jail because we’ve killed an intruder that is killing our cattle or walking around our yard when we have young kids playing in the daytime.”
California moved quickly to list wolves as endangered.
“As soon as one wolf crossed over the border, they were ready for it to be here, so they put it on the endangered species list, even though it’s not the same wolf that was here before,” Roberti explains. “If something is eradicated, if it’s extinct, you just can’t bring anything else back and say, ‘Well, it’s pretty close.’ But that’s what they did.”
Ranchers have pushed for “lethal take” authority in limited circumstances, especially for wolves that repeatedly target livestock. Progress has been slow.
“Once they took out these four wolves in Sierra Valley, lethal take has really stalled,” Roberti says. “We have a terrible pack up north, and they are just a killer pack.”
Roen agrees, pointing out that state policy must differentiate between wild wolves and habituated predators.
“The biggest single thing that will effect change is removing problem animals that can be proven to be habituated to killing livestock,” Roen says. “That’s how it is in every other state. If lethal removal is utilized as a tool for the proven problem animals, the rest get the message fast and stay away. They go back to being wild animals like they should be.”
Non-Lethal Tools: Paintballs, Not Pepper Balls
Even non-lethal tools have become a battleground. Seeking a middle ground between passive hazing and lethal control, officials in Plumas and Sierra counties petitioned state wildlife agencies for non-lethal riot-control tools.
“Our sheriff tried to get the use of pepper balls, saying that it’s a non-injurious thing to do to a wolf,” Roberti explains.
That request was denied, while paintballs was approved. Putting alternative tools into the field, however, has run into administrative delays.
“Coupled with the data agreement, the non-injurious harassment certification allows us to aggressively pursue and haze [wolves] off the property with paintballs,” Roen says. “The RCD purchased 20 platforms to check out, but we’re still waiting on the state to expedite issuing the certificates to everyone who took the course so producers can actually deploy them.”
At the same time, some ranchers are receiving grant-funded night-vision binoculars and other tools through RCDs.
“We’re trying to do some things to help the ranchers with the state providing the money, but it’s just not what we need,” Roberti says. “We need to teach the wolf, you don’t come here.”
Compensation: ‘One Out of Every Six or Seven’
From the outside, wolf programs can look generous. Critics often argue ranchers are being fully compensated for their losses.
“Maybe one out of every six or seven probably gets paid,” Roberti says. “That’s not a very good deal.”
The process to confirm a depredation is rigorous, and ranchers don’t object to high standards in principle. The problem, they say, is that the process doesn’t align with field realities.
“You have to find that animal, the dead animal, soon enough that you can get a USDA trapper or a biologist to come in,” Roberti explains. “They skin that animal and they look for bite marks. They look to see if there’s hemorrhaging, meaning the animal was alive when it was attacked. It’s quite rigorous but also pretty easy to tell.”
Yet many cases are rejected.
“The state keeps throwing them back for technicalities, and I don’t understand because there is money there,” he says. “They really don’t want to have a lot of confirmed kills, and so they fight almost every one and say, well, might have been coyotes.”
DNA has become a double-edged sword.
“Last year we used the DNA. Now this year they’re kind of using it against us,” Roberti says. “As soon as the wolves are done, our coyotes last year were following the wolves around … so there’s going to be coyote DNA on most of the kills unless they find it right away.”
With approximately 14 depredation investigations currently underway across the valley, Roen says the state’s investigation standards have become a source of deep frustration. Before wolves kill outright, they frequently maim livestock.
“I have pictures of live calves bit right across the right flank with two-inch-deep bite marks,” Roen says. “All the marks were identical on five animals. Three came back with wolf DNA and two didn’t, so they’re trying to claim two were bitten by coyotes and three by wolves. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, let’s admit it’s a duck.”
He says there is $2 million budgeted for compensation.
“Why are we critically erring on the side of it not being a wolf instead of giving the benefit of the doubt to producers where we know wolves are actively impacting herds?” Roen stresses. “Producers are unfairly caught in the middle of these politics.”
For some families, the issue goes far beyond dollars and cents.
“There’s a lot of people who will not take a dime because they think it’s blood money, and we’re giving into the problem,” Roberti notes. “I don’t feel that way … some people need to be paid. But I understand the other side also.”
Living With ‘Constant Worry’
The financial stakes are high, but Roberti keeps coming back to the emotional toll.
“It’s a constant worry,” he says. “Every time you go out in the morning, you wonder if something …”
Recently, two wolves were seen out near their place at night.
“So you go out and basically all you can do is listen to the cows and see if they’re making noise,” he says.
He tells of one neighbor whose story has stuck with him.
“A 92-year-old rancher was going out every night and staying in the back of his truck because at that time [the wolves] were coming,” Roberti recalls. “Almost every night these wolves showed up. If they chase them through the fence, then the next morning they worked all day putting [the fence] back together and picking up dead calves. It’s got to stop.”
For ranchers who have been fighting the issue for a decade, he says, the fatigue is real.
“Until it comes to your community, it’s like, ‘I got other things to worry about than wolves.’ I always thought the same — no wolves are going to come to your valley. Well, they did, and then you wake up,” Roberti says.
A United Front: Cross-County Coalitions and High-Level Talks
As wolf sightings expand across county lines into Tehama, Siskiyou and Mariposa counties, Sierra County leaders are actively helping other rural boards establish wolf liaisons and response frameworks.
“We’re starting to have sightings in more counties, so we’re actively working with them to get up to speed,” Roen says. “Tehama County recently confirmed their first kill and created a wolf liaison program. Mariposa County had a sighting right across the fence line where our cattle go. Siskiyou County is seeing severe impacts on the range right now as cattle gather.”
Sierra County has brought neighboring counties into their regular high-level discussions with California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot and California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) leadership.
Rather than waiting on slow-moving legislative reforms, Roen is bringing USDA Wildlife Services and county representatives directly to the table with CDFW staff for a closed-door summit.
“Secretary Crowfoot and Paul Souza from U.S. Fish and Wildlife both support us doing this,” Roen says. “We’re getting in a room with the state director for Wildlife Services and CDFW staff to spend hours going through protocols, investigations, and reducing the daylight between agencies. We need a consistent policy so that when someone investigates an attack, everyone evaluates the evidence the same way instead of trying to challenge it.”
Taking the Debate Beyond Sacramento
Ranchers have spent years pressing state and federal agencies. Now, Roberti thinks the real leverage might lie with non-governmental organizations and donors that support wolf advocacy.
“The government really doesn’t have to do anything, especially in California, because the law says only in this case can you do anything to the wolf,” he says. “So our fight has to go with the groups that are pushing this, the groups that are sleeping well at night thinking it’s cool that wolves are back in California.”
His goal is to get ranchers and wolf advocates in the same room — with the media listening.
“Let’s get in a room, and let’s answer the questions in front of the press, so that you can’t slam them in a way that makes us look bad and makes the wolf look great for every environment,” Roberti says.
Some in his own ranks are wary.
“I’m getting pushback because it’s like getting in bed with the enemy,” he admits. “But that is the only way we’re going to get our message to the people we really need to get it to.”
In the meantime, he’s been sharing a documentary he believes captures what ranch families are experiencing: “Wolves: True Conflict – Episode 2: California,” produced by Western Justice.
“They came to Northern California and interviewed people, and then they came to our area and we told the story of what we went through last summer,” he says. “Some didn’t like it, said it was very slanted, but we told the story, and that’s all we did.”
After watching Western Justice’s earlier Washington state film, Roberti says he was shaken.
“It scared me,” he recalls. “I told my wife, this is already happening here. Everything is the same that’s happened there.”
‘Something’s Going to Give’
Despite some local progress, Roberti is blunt about where he believes this road leads if laws don’t change.
“The wolves are going to be taken out by communities,” he says. “I’m not just saying ranchers. There’s other people involved in this because it’s hurting our economy.”
When formal channels fail, Roberti notes frustration inevitably boils over in the field.
“Wolves are being taken out now,” he says. “Last year I wouldn’t have said that publicly, but it’s the truth, and people need to know that.”
That reality could keep California from ever reaching the population thresholds needed for a “phase three” management regime that would allow more flexible control of problem wolves.
“We’re never going to get to the number because people are going to start taking wolves out, and they already are,” he says.
Beyond the balance sheet, Roberti emphasizes the deepest damage is psychological.
“This is an issue of disrupting people’s businesses and lives, and it’s not about the money,” Roberti says. “It’s about the fear that these things are putting in people … and there’s no end in sight because there’s nothing we can do.”
For now, he intends to keep telling that story — to policymakers in Washington, D.C., to NGOs, to the urban public and to anyone else who will listen.
“I can’t stand this as president, listening to our members and other ranchers going through these terrible times,” he summarizes. “Everyone saying, ‘Oh, I feel so bad for you.’ No — you don’t have a clue what it’s like to feel terrorized like some of these people are.”
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