Glenn Elzinga, CEO and co-founder of Alderspring Ranch, knew life as a cattle rancher was going to change when he heard about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan to reintroduce gray wolves to central Idaho in 1995. 

The reintroduction effort in Idaho was part of a 1987 federal recovery plan for wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains. At the time, gray wolves were protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. 

“A lot of ranchers said, well, you’re shoving this down our throats, but it’s a law. It’s federal law,” That’s why we got wolves,” Elzinga said. “I wasn’t a supporter of it all because I knew they were going to cause us trouble.”

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In two years, 35 wolves were captured in the Canadian Rockies and released in Idaho — 15 in 1995 and 20 in 1996.

Elzinga was working as a firefighter when several wolves, still in transport containers and recovering from a flight, were unloaded in a fire warehouse. He took the rare opportunity to see one up close. 

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“(The wolf) was in this big transport (container) and had these big openings so I could just go and look at her,” Elzinga said, emphasizing how close he had been to the animal. “I’m looking at her and I was like, you’re gonna change our life forever. And they did. They definitely did.”

For Elzinga, whose cattle ranch is nestled in the central Idaho Rocky Mountains, wolves meant losing livestock — and money. 

“They were killing our cattle. We went from maybe losing two or three head a year out of 500 head up to, in 2013, I think we lost 14 or 15 head,” he said. “That was enough of a punch that we just said, hey, we’re not gonna do that anymore, we’re not gonna graze on public land.”

Like Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Idaho Fish and Game would reimburse producers for gray wolf depredations. 

“My problem is that we’re on 70 square miles up there and it’s really abrupt mountain country, all these deep canyons and high ridges,” Elzinga said. “We couldn’t find them in time. You’d find a carcass and the wolves are eating on it and Fish and Game would say, you don’t have any proof that they killed it. They’re just eating a dead animal right now. So we never got the money.”

The losses triggered a major shift in Elzinga’s approach to ranching — from reactive to proactive. “We wanted to be proactive about it instead of reactive with trying to get money from some government fund,” he said. “We didn’t know what that looked like. So we designed a system so that we could coexist with wolves, and as a result, we haven’t had any lethal interactions…we haven’t ever shot wolves, and we stopped losing cattle when we started doing the system.”

Elzinga studied how people used to handle cattle, before the invention of barbed wire and electric fences, and learned how to move cattle — while still having them gain weight — using stockmanship practices. 

“There are sheep herders, right? They stay with their sheep because you’re an idiot if you turn your sheep out, because they’re all gonna die,” Elzinga said. “They’re all gonna die the second you leave. Somebody’s gonna eat them or they’re gonna jump off a cliff. Everybody knew that sheep needed this, but cattle operate quite a bit more independently. They’ll spread out, but with predators, it’s not a win, because, like we found out, we were starting to lose them in a big way.”

Now, Elzinga uses low-stress livestock handling, intensive grazing and nonlethal predator coexistence methods. He hired range riders, pushed back his cow calving dates and genetically encouraged protective mother cows. 

“You have to establish some kind of human presence out there — it is the only reliable deterrent,” Elzinga said. “People who have used dogs have a problem in that most dogs are too small to handle a Canadian wolf.”

In the past 10 years, Alderspring Ranch has had no livestock losses.

The ranch also uses regenerative ranching practices on their 46,000-acre public land grazing allotment, leading to improvements in riparian, fish and sage-grouse habitats and doubling the number of cattle Alderspring can support. 

“(Nonlethal coexistence methods) can be hard to implement, but with help, they are possible, and we have found that there are other benefits to the process of herding or range riding,” Elzinga said. “First, we saw major ecological changes on our range that even created much more grass. We saw increased weight gain on our cattle, and that translated to money. That increased production offset a lot of the cost of range riding.”

On Monday, Elzinga will be in Glenwood Springs to discuss his ranching methods with local producers. Joined by Suzanne Asha Stone, founder and executive director of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network and co-founder of the Wood River Wolf Project, the two will discuss fostering peaceful coexistence between humans, livestock and wolves. 

“If the state is willing to ante up and say, ‘We’re gonna pay you for damages,’ shouldn’t the state be more willing to ante up and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna pay you to recreate your paradigm of grazing both at home and on public land. We’re gonna help you with that,'” Elzinga said. “‘We’re going to partner with you in new methodologies that are going to ensure that you’re nonlethal, and you guys are also not subject to lethal interaction by wolves on your cattle.'”

From 5:30 – 7:30 p.m., Stone and Elzinga will be at the Glenwood Springs Branch Library Community Room, 815 Cooper Ave., Glenwood Springs. 

The discussion is another Coexistence Works event hosted by the Sierra Club, Colorado Wild and the International Wildlife Coexistence Network, three environmental advocacy groups working to bring nonlethal wolf and livestock coexistence methods to the Western Slope. 

“Wolves are an essential species that help protect biodiversity by culling diseased animals and keeping their habitat healthier for all species,” Stone said. “The loss of wolves has serious impacts that undermine ecosystems on a large scale…Unfortunately, wolves are also shrouded by age-old superstition, myth, and misinformation. Helping producers sort through all this will take time.”