Utah State University researcher Julie Young, who leads the USDA’s Predator Ecology and Behavior Project in Utah, is working on a fencing research project in the hopes of coming up with best practices for predator fencing to protect livestock from apex predators.
According to this report, Young’s goal is to create a toolkit that landowners, policymakers and the public can reference when creating fencing strategies. In turn, she hopes her research will support migration routes, carnivore management and local economic interests.
Keeping predators at bay to reduce conflicts with livestock producers would be a dream come true for many, if the project can actually work and has funding sources tied to it to cost-share on expensive fencing projects.
In my past I was a fencing contractor and I can speak from firsthand experience that fences are extremely expensive and labor intensive to put up. What are your thoughts? Do you think this will actually work or is it just a pipe dream?
Leave your comments below.
6 comments
Hi my thoughts are either they will dig under or jump over. And strong enough not to go through. I’m just a hunter from Oregon.
The most inexpensive way to protect livestock, is what they will never do is rethink what the introduction of wolfs has done to create all the problems. Bears and cougars do their share, did we have to add wolfs?
(Wolves)
Complete pipe dream. Ranchers are definitely not going to foot the bill for fencing, the costs are way too high. Tax payers are not going to want to foot the bill either. Sounds like typical government at work…
Get to the rot of the problem stop waisting time and money predator control is the only thing that will work
Plus you make money selling tags not waist it