Two ranchers in Montana embrace predator-friendly ranching.
BY TAYLOR OWENS
To the naked eye, Thirteen Mile Farm might look like any other livestock operation in the West. Sheep graze green and golden fields before a mountainous backdrop, the occasional dog nipping at their heels. But this southwestern Montana ranch is unique in a critical way: it prioritizes predator coexistence.
As long as ranchers have been grazing livestock across the rugged landscapes of the West, they’ve contended with residents who were there before them: bears, wolves, and other predators that can pose a lethal and potentially costly threat to ranchers and their stock. Some forward-thinking ranchers are proving that it doesn’t have to be a matter of us or them, but one of coexistence.
For Becky Weed, who owns Thirteen Mile Farm with her husband Dave Tyler, and has ranched in Montana for decades, predator-friendly ranching is more than just avoiding conflicts with coyotes and mountain lions; it’s about recognizing the larger ecological picture.
“Education about coexistence with predators was always just one piece of a larger effort to figure out how to ranch as if nature matters,” she says, adding that while there’s no “silver bullet” to managing predator interactions, success comes from a deep commitment to understanding the landscape and modifying ranching practices to fit its rhythms. Being tuned in means knowing the terrain, local wildlife patterns and the seasonal changes that affect both predators and livestock.
Weed and Tyler raise sheep, sometimes cattle, and sell lamb and wool. They are nationally recognized for their predator-friendly ranching and human-predator coexistence efforts.
“It wasn’t really a new idea,” Weed says. “People have been doing this for millennia, but it was sort of a reintroduction of the idea to the Intermountain West to some extent, and now it’s very common, and of course lots of people are doing a variety of things to learn to coexist with predators.”
Some of the effective strategies Weed has implemented on her small ranch include utilizing guard dogs, strategic timing of human presence, grass management strategies, and integrated pest management. All of these tactics are scale dependent; there isn’t one simple solution for every ranch. But paying attention and learning through trial and error can work anywhere.
“If we are alert, we have a better capacity to protect ourselves,” Weed says.
Weed recounts a time 15 years ago when mountain lions were coming down from the mountains behind her ranch due to a disease affecting the deer population. The cats were killing sheep— both ewes and lambs.
“I did a number of things,” she says. “I’d take walks at unpredictable hours of day and night. We got a rechargeable flashlight that was kind of like a truck headlight. I could shine it a half mile down to the end of a field, and a lot of people say that unpredictable lighting can be very disruptive to cats, and I think it worked in our case.”
Weed acknowledges that her practices still draw rebuttal. “Nobody likes to have their animals harassed or killed by predators. There’s nothing fun about that.” Predators cause an estimated $232 million in losses to livestock producers each year in the U.S., according to a report from the United States Department of Agriculture. This cost is in part passed on to the government, which offers various reimbursement programs for depredation loss.
Predator-friendly ranching has been practiced since long before European settlers claimed stakes in what became the United States of America, but as the national sentiment during westward expansion leaned toward conquering nature over coexisting with it, such practices went out of vogue. In their place came lethal intervention, an alternative to predator-friendly ranching still practiced by many today—though this tactic may also now be in decline.
“Education about coexistence with predators was always just one piece of a larger effort to figure out how to ranch as if nature matters.” – Becky Weed, Owner of Thirteen Mile Farm
Wolf depredation of livestock, one of the more hot button ranching issues in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, dipped in Montana in 2023, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The state confirmed wolves killed 23 cattle, eight sheep and one livestock guard dog throughout the year, with an additional six cattle, one sheep and one horse identified as probable wolf kills. The department reported cattle kills were down substantially compared to annual data from 2011-2022, as were sheep kills despite a previous uptick in sheep depredation. As a result, 31 wolves were killed in 2023 to prevent further depredation, a significant decrease in the previous annual average of 60 wolf kills.
And yet, many ranchers are resistant to adopting coexistence-motivated practices and have strong feelings toward the larger creatures sharing the landscape. According to Hilary Zaranek, a rancher internationally recognized for her pioneering work in predator-livestock conflict reduction, these acts of resistance may be more a byproduct of the industry than the issue itself.
“It’s primarily an issue of fear combined with other financial or emotional stressors on those ranches,” Zaranek says. “If you can address the emotional and the financial stressors, all of a sudden, the grizzly bear is really a non-issue.” She says ranching is not just a job, it is a way of life. Ranchers face many limitations in implementing predator-friendly changes, she adds, whether they’re generational or financial.
“I think that it’s hard when you’ve dedicated your life to believing certain values and in building a life around those values and get to be 70 years old and think, ‘Huh, now is a great time to completely change all of this,’” Zaranek says. “Ranches that don’t have a strong next generation coming back or a next generation that is thinking outside of the box, those are limitations.” For Zaranek, who ranches with her husband, Andrew, at J Bar L Ranch in Montana’s Centennial Valley, it’s a matter of re-envisioning the approach to wildlife-livestock interactions.
“Wildlife-livestock conflict really is solved currently through half of the equation, which is [to] manage the wildlife,” Zaranek says. “And Andrew and I really have focused on the other half of the equation, which is [to] manage the cattle.” For example, Zaranek practices herding cattle versus scattering them, which keeps the unit moving frequently. She says this is an effective change that didn’t require a fundamental overhaul of the operation. “That’s an example of a change that we’ve made in our management that not only has shown to reduce vulnerability to wolf predation in particular, but it also has had a positive impact ecologically from the standpoint of soil and range management, as well as from effectiveness and efficiency of our riders,” Zaranek says, referring to range riders who patrol and monitor large areas of rangeland on horseback, overseeing the herd to check for signs of predators and ensure their animals’ safety.
Zaranek runs a large ranching operation with pastures ranging from 900 to 6,000 acres in diverse mountain country. When cattle are scattered, she explains it could take all day for a rider to cover that country with the possibility of not seeing any cows. By keeping the cattle together in smaller areas and moving, riders can spend less than half the time to find all the cattle, and know if they lost something. “Riders are then better positioned to move them, to doctor them, to do anything that they need to do instead of spending all day riding just to find only 60 percent of your herd,” Zaranek says. “That’s an example of one change in management that has had this positive ripple effect in many areas, ecologically and economically on the ranch.”
Rather than focusing on the losses caused by predators, Zaranek points out that other factors, including poisonous plants such as tall larkspurs, are often the leading causes of livestock deaths. “The losses happen, but they are not significant compared to all of the types of losses that we experience,” she says. “And it’s not even ‘Manage the cattle to not have a depredation.’ It’s more of ‘Manage the cattle in the context of our larger ranch goals.’”
The business and financial sides of running a ranch are greatly affected by year-to-year changes in conditions, including shifts in the natural environment, leading to varying levels of herd loss. “There’s just a lot of diversity within the different enterprises themselves,” Zaranek says. “We have a lot of flexibility to be buying and selling cattle based on what is happening ecologically on the landscape. We can take advantage of when things are good and where they’re good and when things are not good and where they’re not good.”
Ranching demands a deep connection to the land and constant adaptation. Zaranek has observed the behavior of both predators and cattle on her ranch, gaining a deeper understanding of how they interact. She recalls a day when she went to check on some cows and observed the cows chasing wolves. “I’ve had a lot of really special opportunities to actually witness cattle in relationship to different people handling them in different ways; grizzly bears interested in one food source versus other types of food sources; wolves that are hunted, wolves that aren’t hunted,” she says. “It’s through actually seeing it that you can’t deny that there’s more to the story.”
TAYLOR OWENS is the Content Marketing Lead at Outlaw Partners.
