I have often wondered if it wouldn't be cheaper for the government to pay for the occasional lost cattle instead of costly rehabilitation. Of course there would need to be safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the mechanism, and to prevent predators from getting used to easy preys.

Me too. Compared to all the other subsidies agriculture receives worldwide this would probably be pretty small.

One problem with cattle is that they are being held in one place, can’t escape which makes them easy and reliable prey . So once a predator has figured that out they will come back more often. I have read about people having good success with dogs that are trained to confront predators like mountain lions and bears so they won’t come back.

Or, and this is just a personal opinion, but the world could stand to lose some meat production. We could give them a stipend for moving away from ranching to protein production through plants or other goods. I know this is controversial, but meat does require orders of magnitude more water and resources and doesn’t seem reflective in the revenue realized.

Edit-but definitely start by paying them for whatever wolves eat.

The wide ranging public pasture ranchers aren't where the biggest ethical problems are in meat production, and wolves aren't generally an issue with factory farming.

Let's pump the brakes on torture box meat before we start trying to solve something many people don't even consider a problem (I believe ranching and free range meat are an almost unmitigated good. )

I've proposed this many times, but the idea gets no traction. I don't really know why. I bet paying for a cow now and then would be even cheaper than paying government hunters to use helicopters, etc., to hunt the wolves.

It's an appropriate use of tax money.

https://www.mda.state.mn.us/business-dev-loans-grants/wolf-d...: “the 1977 Minnesota Legislature authorized the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) to reimburse livestock owners for losses caused by wolves”

Reading https://www.minnpost.com/environment/2020/02/heres-how-much-..., that gets around 100 claims per year, for a payout of about $100,000.

The EU has a similar program (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46153727)

Sounds like a good program.

In Washington State, the newspaper articles on it always present it as one of:

1. the state sends out the helicopters and gunmen

2. the rancher eats the cost of the dead cows

And yet, there’s https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/at-risk/species-recover....

I wouldn’t know whether that compensation is fair or how bureaucratic the procedure is.

I wonder how vulnerable that is to the Cobra Effect.

Any and all government payment programs are vulnerable to that.