Drones sic AC/DC on wolves to safeguard livestock

For millennia humans have tried to scare wolves away from their livestock. Most of them didn’t have drones.

- BY CEDAR ATTANASIO

U.S. Department of Agriculture WOLVES halt a night attack on cattle along the California-Oregon border after a noisy drone approached.

But biologists working near the California-Oregon border do, and they're using them to blast AC/DC's “Thunderstruck,” movie clips and live human voices at the apex predators to shoo them away from cattle in an ongoing experiment.

“I am not putting up with this anymore!” actor Scarlett Johansson yells in one clip from the 2019 film “Marriage Story.”

“With what? I can’t talk to people?” costar Adam Driver shouts back.

Gray wolves were hunted nearly to extinction throughout the American West by the first half of the 20th century. Since their reintroduction in Idaho and at Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, they've proliferated to the point that a population in the Northern Rockies has been removed from the endangered species list.

There are now hundreds of wolves in Washington and Oregon, dozens more in Northern California and thousands roaming near the Great Lakes.

The recovering population has meant increasing conflict with ranchers — and increasingly creative efforts by the latter to protect livestock. They’ve turned to electrified fencing, wolf alarms, guard dogs, horseback patrols, trapping and relocating, and now drones. In some areas where nonlethal efforts have failed, officials routinely approve killing wolves, including last week in Washington state.

Gray wolves killed some 800 domesticated animals across 10 states in 2022, a previous Associated Press review of data from state and federal agencies found.