A little-known federal government agency that kills wild animals at the request of ranchers and farmers accidentally killed two federally protected wolves in Southern Oregon last summer.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife annual wolf population report, published Friday, offered the first disclosure of the accidental gray wolf killings.

It’s only mentioned in a single sentence in the 12-page report.

The report reveals Wildlife Services – a program under the federal U.S. Department of Agriculture – was supposed to be removing coyotes when it instead killed the wolves. At least one of the wolves was a collared male that had traveled from Northern California to Oregon.

A lot of details are still unclear.

Wildlife conservation groups are skeptical that a federal agency whose focus is to kill wild animals could have made such a mistake.

“It’s utterly unacceptable that a federal employee or contractor would not have enough basic wildlife identification knowledge to know the difference between a wolf and a coyote,” said Bethany Cotton, the conservation director at Cascadia Wildlands, an Oregon-based conservation nonprofit. “They’re significantly different in size and physical appearance.”

Wolves, especially males, are significantly larger than coyotes, weighing around 70-100 pounds, whereas coyotes only weigh at roughly 25-50 pounds.

Tanya Espinosa, a public affairs specialist at the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, confirmed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office of law enforcement is actively conducting an investigation. Espinosa declined to share more details about the investigation or whether it relates to the wolves killed in Southern Oregon.

A spokesperson with U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to comment.

Michelle Dennehy, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, told OPB that CA102, a collared 2-year-old male wolf that had dispersed from the Beyem Seyo pack in Northern California, was killed July 31, 2025.

Last summer, CA102 killed at least two calves and injured one, all in Klamath County, according to ODFW wolf-livestock investigation records.

Because gray wolves in the western two-thirds of Oregon are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, it’s up to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to manage and investigate conflicts between wolves, livestock and wolf mortalities, Dennehy said.

“When there is a human-caused wolf mortality in areas of the state where wolves are federally protected, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Law Enforcement are the lead and handle the investigation including release of information,” Dennehy said in an email.

Killing an animal listed as an endangered species is both a federal and state crime.

Wildlife Services has long been a controversial and often secretive program under the umbrella of the USDA. The agency kills hundreds of thousands of wild animals a year across the nation.

In Oregon, Wildlife Services killed or removed 155,958 wild animals in 2023, according to the latest publicly available data. Coyotes are, by far, the animals Wildlife Services most frequently killed in the state, and across much of the Western U.S.

Conservation groups have long criticized the agency for killing wild animals without presenting enough evidence that the animal posed a risk or threat to livestock, crops or people.

Some investigations have found the agency has in the past accidentally killed federally protected wild animals, or killed native animals that hadn’t injured or posed any risk to livestock.

Cascadia Wildlands’ Cotton said it’s also a basic tenet of the North American wildlife management model that someone should know what they’re pointing at before they shoot.

“You need to be 100% sure before you use a weapon that is fatal, that you know what your target is,” Cotton said. “And in this instant, either this person was incredibly poorly trained or was OK with shooting a federally protected species.”

Wildlife Services has often used a range of methods to capture or kill the animals, including foothold traps, neck snares, cyanide poisoning and shooting them from helicopters.

Wildlife conservation groups have called some of those methods cruel and unnecessary.

“There have been, for many years, reports and controversy about how this program operates and how unaccountable it is to the public,” Cotton said. “Including internal government audits that have demonstrated that they can’t track how they’ve spent federal funds.”

Despite a record number of wolf deaths in 2025, Oregon’s gray wolf population has continued to grow, reaching 230 last year, a 13% increase from 2024, according to the ODFW annual wolf report. A total of 42 wolf deaths were recorded in 2025. ODFW killed 20 wolves in Eastern Oregon in response to livestock-wolf conflicts. Gray wolves on that side of the state are not federally protected.

In Western Oregon, gray wolves have yet to reach species recovery goals, and so remain protected. It’s unclear if the second killed wolf was a female CA102 was pairing with.

“If that’s the case, then we lost the potential for a new pack in Western Oregon because they would have likely then denned in the spring and would be having puppies right about now,” Cotton said. “It’s a huge loss.”

Cotton also questions why it has taken so long to carry out an investigation and why so little information has been revealed.

The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission – a volunteer advisory board appointed by the governor and oversees the ODFW – is scheduled to meet Thursday and Friday, and will discuss the wolf report.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/21/federal-agency-accidentally-killed-2-protected-oregon-wolves-last-year-state-report-reveals/