Raising cattle in southwestern Montana outside of Yellowstone National Park has led a community to creatively develop and practice proactive ranching methods to minimize conflicts between livestock and large predators. Additionally they seek to improve rangeland health and wildlife habitat and support sustainable ranching businesses across the landscape. To achieve these goals, the community seeks to open and create middle ground between all involved by focusing on creating ways to minimize the challenges of ranching with wolves and bears through progressive ranch management. Low-stress stockmanship, with an aim to encourage natural herding and mothering behaviors to protect vulnerable young from predators, as well as increased human presence from range riders is currently being practiced with an aim to reduce livestock-predator conflict and has produced encouraging outcomes. This presentation will discuss experiences with low-stress stockmanship and other husbandry techniques in wolf and grizzly country and implications for their use in additional contexts and circumstances.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.