State of Utah Department of Agriculture and Food

Wildlife Services Earns Vision Award

The USDA-APHIS honored Utah's Wildlife Services program with the agency's highest award the Vision Award for Utah's exemplary work in strategic planning to reduce livestock losses during the past year. USDA Deputy Administrator Bobby Acord presented Utah Wildlife Services Director Mike Bodenchuk with the award on June 5, 1998, in Salt Lake City.

Acord called Utah's program the best in the nation for its forward thinking and planning. Few states have established a multi-year plan for the future as Utah has.

According to Bodenchuk, Utah's strategic planning developed a five-year goal to keep livestock and wildlife predator losses to reasonable levels.

Utah's five-year plan emphasizes the following:

Information and communication
Developing methods for WS management plan
Value and investing in people
Providing wildlife services

Bodenchuk says the program works well because it is based on sound information obtained from extensive environmental assessments of Utah livestock and wildlife populations. He says studies of increasing coyote populations indicated that preventative steps in small areas would be needed prior to the onset of losses. The plan also establishes a target loss for sheep at three percent and five percent for lambs. Those numbers are based on industry-wide acceptable losses. He said that without the WS Program, losses to lambs would be about 26 percent, and losses to sheep would be about 11 percent, levels too high so sustain a viable sheep industry in Utah. "This is a real credit to the efforts here in Utah to position the program where it should be in responding to changing times. We should all be proud that our collective efforts have not gone unnoticed," said Bodenchuk.

Bodenchuk says the program's cost benefit ratio is excellent. For every $1.00 spent on livestock protection, it saves $1.30 in livestock losses. And for every $1.00 spent on wildlife protection, the program saves $2.60 in wildlife losses.

Bodenchuk credits the program's success to the work of the 36 state and federal employees in the program, and support from Commissioner of Food and Agriculture, Cary G. Peterson.

Posted 16 June, 1998