2,800+ wolves killed, nearly $10 million spent and 15 caribou herds still at risk: Why scientists say British Columbia is targeting the wrong problem

Since 2015, British Columbia has killed 200-300 wolves annually to help endangered caribou populations recover. Recently, the provincial government has proposed extending its decade-long wolf cull program by five more years in areas that are home to 15 declining woodland caribou herds. But according to scientists, the deforestation, not the wolves, is the main driver of caribou declines. They claim the province’s focus on wolf culls is a short-sighted approach that will ultimately not even save the caribou population but also have adverse unintended consequences on the ecosystem, according to a report by Mongabay.In April 2026, provincial authorities in the region began engaging key stakeholders about the proposed extension under its Caribou Recovery Program. They talked to about 70 First Nations in affected areas, hundreds of landowners, environmental NGOs and others. According to a spokesperson from the provincial Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and the Ministry of Forests, they are expected to make a final decision by October.If the proposal passes, the government will continue shooting grey wolves, the primary predators of woodland caribou in 15 areas with herds. Eleven of these locations will have a yearly cull; in four, the canids will be killed every two years, said the spokesperson.B.C.’s wolf cull program was instituted to reverse historic caribou declines. Provincial data today show the ungulate’s numbers are rising in areas where wolves are killed. But the proposed extension, without steps to address habitat loss, has sparked outrage and concern among conservationists and scientists.At the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, a B.C. based NGO, wildlife biologist Paul Paquet described it as an “equivocal, intensely debated” issue. “There’s a lot of moral confusion and ethical dilemmas here on this question about protecting caribou and helping caribou by killing wolves.”Caribou do need the protection. Over the past three decades, the population of southern mountain caribou has declined by more than half and the provincial government declared about 10 herds to be locally extinct as of 2023. In 2003, the ungulates were classified as threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA).In 2014, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), an advisory body to the federal government on wildlife conservation, designated the caribou populations in south and central B.C. as endangered. About 1,900 caribou remain there, according to provincial estimates.

A minor threat

Many wolves suffer a slow, painful death, according to information obtained by Pacific Wild.

Every winter, the government hires contractors to shoot entire packs of wolves from low-flying helicopters in caribou habitats, wiping out about 80-90% of these predators in the area. Many suffer a slow, painful death, according to information obtained by Pacific Wild. These killings are in addition to legalised trapping and wolf hunts in the province.But according to experts, wolves are a relatively minor threat compared to widespread loss of the caribou’s preferred old-growth forest habitat, which is falling to logging and mining projects and being levelled for oil and gas pipelines.B.C.’s mountains are home to about 4,000 woodland caribou, which constitute the southern mountain population. These herds live in old-growth forests across the deep-snow regions of southeastern B.C. and parts of the northern U.S., eating lichens that grow on centuries-old trees high up the mountains to survive the winter.But over the last century, much of these old-growth forests have been cut down, harvested for timber, or levelled to make way for mining operations and oil and gas pipelines, according to a 2020 report. Loss of critical habitat starves caribou of their winter food and leaves them vulnerable to predator attacks.“Caribou’s long-term evolutionary strategy was to segregate themselves to become more of an old-growth ungulate specialist, whereas some of the other ungulates were in younger forests,” said wildlife biologist Cole Burton, who runs the Wildlife Coexistence Lab at the University of British Columbia. “So caribou could get away from some of these concentrations of wolves.”As old-growth forests fall and younger trees replace them, white-tailed deer and moose move into the landscape, Burton said, “and it’s made the conditions worse for the caribou.” Predators such as wolves, pumas, black bears and others then follow these prey species.A recent study from Burton’s lab shows how clear-cut forests act as “ecological traps” for mountain caribou, who otherwise tend to avoid them. “We’ve found that the caribou in our study area are selecting these cut blocks probably because they’re nutritionally stressed,” Burton said, they’re hungry. “This is bringing them into areas where there’s more predation risk.”Apart from logging, slicing up the forest for roads and pipelines also impacts caribou. More than 600,000 kilometres (about 373,000 miles) of service roads, built to transport timber and mined ore and maintain pipelines, snake through the province, opening this terrain to humans and other animals.“Wolves use these linear features to travel two to three times faster,” said Jason Fisher, who runs the Applied Conservation Macroecology Lab at the University of Victoria, Canada, referring to his study that investigated moose deaths. “A faster wolf increases its encounter rate with caribou, which increases kill rates and draws caribou populations down.”Habitat lost to logging and fires pushes caribou closer to the brink. “What human activity has done is created more access and shifted those predator-prey dynamics,” said Greer from the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. “When [caribou numbers] get to such a low point, one wolf running into one caribou can make a huge difference.”

A provincial project

In 2015, the B.C. government launched the predator management program, targeting wolves and pumas (Puma concolor) in key caribou habitat. “It was originally described as an emergency measure and a very short-term action to take as a kind of last-ditch effort to save some of these dwindling caribou herds,” said Kristen Weiss, wildlife and forests campaigner at Pacific Wild, a B.C.-based environmental nonprofit that’s followed the impact of the wolf culls since they began.But that “emergency measure” has continued for more than a decade, killing 200-300 wolves each year. To date, B.C. has killed about 2,800 wolves, spending about C$13 million ($9.4 million) in taxpayer money.It still remains unclear how this has affected the numbers of the wolves. The province estimates there are anywhere between 5,300 and 11,600 wolves and says it isn’t a species of concern. But no one knows for sure as there hasn’t been a B.C.-wide systematic survey. Wolves are intelligent animals with a highly organised social structure. “Removing breeding individuals can have huge impacts on the persistence of that pack and the longevity of that pack,” said Chelsea Greer, director of the wolf conservation program at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, adding that by killing adults, “you’re losing a lot of generational knowledge” among packs.The last cull program, which began in 2021, expired in March of this year. Officials reached out to stakeholders for input, but unlike the last extension, they have not made a public announcement or engaged the public in discussions. “There hasn’t been a lot of clarity around the process of how they decide they’re to extend or not,” Weiss said, adding that her organisation was consulted by representatives from the caribou recovery program. “We were not given a proposal document; they just gave us a short PowerPoint presentation about their proposed extension, and then we were meant to provide feedback.”A more recent survey, conducted in 2026 by Pacific Wild, found about three-quarters of the province’s people oppose any wolf killing.

Intervening in an ecosystem

By altering habitats and killing predators selectively, they affect entire ecosystems in a domino effect

As humans continue to interfere with the landscape by altering habitats and killing predators selectively, they affect entire ecosystems in a domino effect, say conservationists. While some of these effects are known, others are not.Killing large numbers of wolves from helicopters changes the behaviour of the canids, according to a 2025 study by Fisher, Burton and their colleagues. “Instead of being predominantly active during the day, they switch to nighttime mode … that’s when they come out in force, because they clearly recognise that the daytime is a dangerous place for them to be,” Fisher said. The wolves then prey on small mammals active at night, such as snowshoe hares.The study also found that coyotes and lynx, which compete with wolves, also adjusted the times when they prowl. “Before the cull, when you had wolves dominating a landscape, coyotes and lynx used patches of the landscape where wolves were not,” Fisher said. When the wolves disappeared, these other predators became more active.However, Fisher said, “We don’t know what the knock-on effects are going to be.” Coyotes can hunt and kill caribou calves. If these canids replace their larger cousins, it will mean that the wolves were killed essentially for no reason, Fisher said.Habitat restoration will take years, possibly a century before it really takes effect, wildlife biologist Fisher said, “and caribou don’t have a century.” “We have to stop the rampant development, clearing of new linear features and areas, and we have to restore what we’ve already disturbed. We have to start it now if we want to have an ecosystem that looks boreal in the next century,” Fisher said, urging the province to act now.But some short-term fixes do exist. Studies show that blocking roads and seismic lines and putting up flags near them drives wolves away. Another intervention is to turn the soil where roads and pipelines exist, mound it up, plant trees and help forests regrow, so wolves don’t use the roads as shortcuts to get to the caribou.