Huff and Puff and Blow it off

What’s Fish and Game to Do? Wolf Pack Keeps Eating Their Radio Collars

By Jennifer Gelband, 7-28-06

Wolves. They have been big and bad and hungry and cunning for as long as we’ve known them. Lately they have been reminding Idaho Fish and Game officials how cunning they really are by removing the radio collars the agency uses to track their movements.

In a story reported by KTVB’s Kaycee Murray the timberline wolf pack near Idaho City has learned how to chew off their radio collars. And F&G officials don’t know why.

F&G officials don’t know why the wild wolves are gnawing on the thick leather around their neck? Um, don’t wolves enjoy eating most animals that make leather? This is like those elastic candy necklaces American children wear. It’s not delicious, but it’s something like food right there, strung around our necks. So we eat it.

“I think it might be a boredom thing,” Steve Nadeau of Fish and Game told the station. “They look at it and wonder what that new necklace is all about and then they start chewing on it.”

The collars help the state play big brother to the wolf packs by tracking their locations and their populations. There are two wolves in the Timberline pack that are still wearing their collars (finicky eaters, perhaps) and officials, who check out the wolf activity every two or three weeks, say this pack requires new collars every year. Other packs generally need their collars replaced every three or four years.

To get these undomesticated, hungry wolves to wear technical neckware collars isn’t as easy as it sounds. The wolves are first trapped and then sedated before adorned with the collars.

I hope they can solve this problem soon. Before the wolves come to eat my leather iPod case.

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