Originally Posted by elchivito

No they're not. Livestock damage by wolves anywhere in the Southwestern U.S. is statistically insignificant.
The biggest causes of predator losses to livestock are coyotes, feral coydogs and feral dogs.
Wolves are scary creatures that inhabit a part of our brain that hasn't changed since we were babies listening to creepy european fairy tales that more often than not featured a big bad wolf. Wolves were summarily wiped out of europe, and when europeans came to this continent they brought their infantile superstitions with them.

I'm all for wolf recovery, but it sounds like that pack's removal won't impact recovery in WA, good.
Those ranchers are welfare grazing on public lands. Their cattle's welfare should be secondary, not a primary concern to the state and it should be their responsibility to protect their herds from predation or be willing to eat the overhead as a cost of doing private business on publicly owned land.