Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance

From the Executive Director

The Story Nobody Is Writing

On wolves, depredation stories, and the questions we refuse to stop asking

His name was Benson.

He was less than a year old. Forty pounds. Brown and tan. He wore an orange collar — the color of I am not wild, I am not a threat, I belong to someone. On March 18, 2025, he got loose in Sierra County, California, in the middle of what local officials had declared a wolf emergency. Someone saw him and shot him dead.

The Sheriff investigated. Confirmed it was a dog. Filed no charges. Named no shooter. Issued no statement of consequence. Benson’s family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit — without a lawyer, because that’s what you do when you have no other option.

The local paper that covered every confirmed livestock kill, every rancher’s sleepless night, every legislative hearing — never wrote a single word about it.

Benson is why I do this work. And Benson is why I’ve stopped responding to depredation stories the way everyone expects me to.

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Why I don’t respond to depredation stories

The only stories about wolves are depredation stories. Even when a reporter is covering wolf benefits, poaching, or recovery — somehow they feel obligated to include the other side. And it’s almost never the actual farmer having the problem. It’s the Farm Bureau. It’s Hunter Nation, which is just a front for big paper. It’s outlier bear hunters. And the moment we respond to that framing, we’ve confirmed it — we’ve said yes, there are two sides here, and we’re the wolf side.

So I don’t. And I want to be clear — I’m not dismissing the coexistence work people are doing. That work matters. But the second I say “yes, this happened, and here’s how farmers can coexist with wolves,” I’ve just agreed that wolves are a problem.

They’re not.

What the data actually says

Wisconsin has 64,000 farms. In any given year, roughly 20 report wolf depredation. The other 63,980 are not in the news. Farmers and landowners within wolf range — the people actually living with wolves — tolerate the numbers we have or more. The people who hate wolves in this state are not farmers. They are a very loud, very well-funded outlier group that does not represent rural Wisconsin, and they are almost never identified as such in a news story.

So when a reporter calls me about a depredation, here’s where I go instead: if this farm is losing animals to wolves, they are almost certainly losing animals to coyotes, bears, and dogs too — but none of that is making the news. This farmer isn’t the bad guy. This farmer is an outlier who clearly needs real support, because what’s happening to them is just not happening to essentially anyone else in the state. Something unusual is going on, and we should want to help them figure out what it is.

We pay out around $160,000 a year in wolf depredation reimbursements. Is that buying goodwill? Is it solving anything? Because 99.9% of Wisconsin farms aren’t having this problem. Wouldn’t that money do more good figuring out why this particular farm keeps showing up in the data — and helping them do what everybody else is already doing?

And if a farmer wants state help with any of it, the price is opening their private land to public hunting. Seven hundred and eighty-four farmers have complained about that program. The state isn’t protecting farmers. It’s using them to justify hunting access.

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The data is already framed against wolves

Before anyone asks a single question, the data is already being used to build a case. Consider this: there’s a harassment complaint on the books in Wisconsin where wolves ran the boundary of a property, two livestock guardian dogs barked from inside the farm, and the wolves left. No losses. Nothing. That got recorded as a harassment complaint.

That should be a headline. That’s the whole point of livestock guardian dogs. The system worked exactly as it was supposed to. Instead that incident is sitting in a database being used to build a case against wolves, and no reporter has ever asked what actually happened.

Then there’s Wildlife Services — agents telling farmers their hands are tied because of federal protections, sending a clear message that lethal control is the preferred solution. But killing a wolf doesn’t fix anything. If that farm is having issues with wolves, they almost certainly have predator pressure from coyotes, bears, and dogs too. Remove the one predator with federal protection and that farm has the same problem next season. Nothing is solved. The question of why is never asked.

What happened in Sierra Valley

Sierra County, California is the clearest possible example of what happens when nobody asks these questions.

The man who declared the wolf emergency — Paul Roen, chair of the county Board of Supervisors, fifth-generation rancher, member of the California Cattlemen’s Association wolf policy committee — had the highest number of confirmed wolf kills in the valley, operated a ranch less than a mile from the wolf den, and had collected $607,944 in federal agricultural subsidies over three decades. He declared the emergency. He never recused himself from a single decision. Not in the county record. Not in a single piece of media coverage.

Ranchers in the affected valley received $910.50 in non-lethal deterrent grants. Not $910,000. Nine hundred and ten dollars and fifty cents, across a valley running 20,000 head of cattle. Only 18 ranches enrolled in the coexistence program. When the state’s Strike Team finally arrived — eighteen months after the first confirmed kill — they deployed 18,000 staff hours over 114 days and stopped an estimated 95 additional livestock kills. The tools worked. The science worked. Nobody had wanted to use them.

Two wolf pups died in the field before anyone fired a shot — found severely decomposed, causes undetermined. A yearling died. Their deaths were not reported. They were not mentioned at press conferences. They were not part of the story the valley told about what the summer cost.

We know all of this because we read the records. We cross-referenced the subsidy databases. We found the lawsuit nobody covered. This is what the background work looks like — and it is the only thing standing between the manufactured narrative and the truth.

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Meet Mary Falk

Mary farms with sheep, cows, and goats in wolf country. She runs livestock guardian dogs — animals that, as she puts it, speak the language the wolf understands, that say keep moving, keep moving. Wolves, coyotes, black bears, otters, and bald eagles move through her land regularly. No livestock losses. Twenty-five years.

Mary is never in the news. Because her farm works. She is the rule. The farms making headlines are the exception. And we may be the only ones consistently saying so.

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What we actually do

I was on a radio interview not long ago. A man was describing a loss — just like losing a family member, he said. So I asked what the animal’s name was.

He said: “What?”

I said: family members have names.

Turns out he hadn’t farmed since 2019. He’d sold the farm. He was telling a depredation story about a property he no longer owns. I have never heard of a single person in Wisconsin who had to sell their farm because of wolves.

That is what these stories are. And that’s why we ask questions instead of responding to the frame. The database cross-referencing, the records requests, the lawsuit nobody covered, the subsidy figures nobody reported — that is the work that actually moves the needle on wolf delisting. It doesn’t look flashy. It doesn’t go viral. But it is the work that changes what people believe — and what policymakers can get away with saying in public.

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Benson has no memorial. The two wolf pups found decomposing in a Sierra Valley field before the shooting even started have no memorial. This piece is an attempt to correct that. https://speakforwildlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/smith2026bensond12bnfr.pdf

Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance is 100% volunteer. No paid staff. No office. What we have is the commitment to be in the room, to read the records, to ask the question nobody else is asking — and people like you who make it possible. If you want someone asking those questions when the next emergency is declared and the next story is written, please consider making a gift today.