On Aug. 18, 2010, the president of Defenders of Wildlife sent a letter to Rowan Gould, the acting director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, announcing that the non-profit was ceasing its 23-year-old compensation fund. The fund has paid out $1.4 million to livestock producers for verified losses attributable to wolves — whether they were reintroduced wolves or naturally re-colonizing wolves — throughout the Northern Rocky Mountains and the desert southwest. The letter announces that the Defenders compensation program will end on September 10, 2010. Ranchers won’t be left entirely in the cold though, new federal legislation provides funding to assist states in crafting their own compensation programs, and Defenders has announced that it will be shifting its focus to its Wolf Coexistence Partnership program. This program has long lived in the shadow of the livestock compensation program at DOW. It aims to help livestock producers figure out (and pay for) pro-active solutions that reduce livestock-wolf conflicts in the first place. Whether it’s penning pregnant cows and buying winter hay, hiring range riders, or putting up turbo fladry — the proactive program attempts to teach ranchers new solutions or enable them to enact solutions they could not otherwise afford that have a high potential for deterring wolf attacks. Personally, I am surprised and a little pleased to see this announcement. There is a growing body of literature suggesting that paying livestock producers for wolf-killed cattle does more harm than good. I truly believe that Defenders entered into their program with the right intentions of trying to help protect wolves, and to remove the economic burden to ranchers of placing a predator on the landscape, but I think over the years we’ve seen that reliance on a payment program short-circuits encouraging ranchers to adopt methods that deter attacks in the first place. Later this week or next I will try to do a post on the pros and cons of compensation, and alternative models that switch the frame from a negative incentive (payment for a wolf-killed carcass) to a positive incentive (such as payment for densities of predators on a rancher’s land). (At the moment, I’m traveling for work so it may be a little while before I can get to this.)