How Many Wolves Is Enough?
Now that thousands live in the United States, some people would like to kill more of them.
Updated at 10:02 a.m. ET on February 16, 2026
The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in Northern California’s Sierra Valley. He started finding the bleeding bodies of calves—some still alive, so badly paralyzed that they’d need to be shot. After weeks of this, Roen finally saw a kill himself. “One wolf grabbed a cow and spun her around, while another grabbed a calf,” he told me. “He tore it into three pieces in 30 seconds.”
Every night, Roen would go out in his pickup truck and try to keep the wolves away from his animals, until exhaustion drove him to bed in the hours before dawn. He came to dread the sound of his cows bawling for their lost calves. By June, Roen, who is also a Sierra County supervisor, and his fellow ranchers had persuaded the state to intervene: A team started to patrol the Sierra Valley rangeland, harassing wolves with rubber bullets, sirens, and eventually drones. At one point, Roen said, officials even tried piling frozen beavers outside the wolves’ den to sate their hunger. But still, the kills continued.
