HAILEY — For one Idaho wolf pack, there wasn’t much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving.

On Nov. 23 and 24, federal officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Idaho Wildlife Services program took to the air to cull seven members of the Basin Butte wolf pack, which frequents the Stanley Basin.

Todd Grimm, western district supervisor for the program, said that pack, which numbered at least 12 before the kills, has been responsible for extensive loss of livestock owned by local ranchers.

Since July 2008, he said, they have killed seven adult cows, five calves and 36 sheep, all but four on private land.

Grimm coordinated with the Idaho Fish and Game Department, which he said authorized the removal of up to 10 of the wolves via helicopter and fixed-wing airplane hunt.

“We wanted to react as quickly as we could after the last depredation, in the first week of November. We wanted to make sure we got the wolves responsible,” Grimm said.

If they had waited, he said, that pack could have changed such that the members couldn’t be identified, perhaps by permitted hunters harvesting collared wolves. Grimm said getting the responsible wolves is important because the younger members of the pack were learning livestock predation behavior from the older members, sharing the knowledge that sheep and cattle are easy prey.

However, opponents of the wolf-kill action, such as Defenders of Wildlife and the Western Watersheds Project, say other nonlethal methods would have been just as effective in stopping predation — and that the kill actually opens up territory for other packs that might not be as easy to track.

“By eliminating most of the members of the pack now, they’re going to open it up to recolonizing by another pack over the wintertime,” said Suzanne Stone, Northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “They’ve basically eliminated a pack that was holding that territory, and the pack that moves in may not have any radio collars on them at all.”

Stone said killing these wolves doesn’t resolve livestock losses in the area, except perhaps in the short term. Instead, she said, it creates a cycle of livestock predation followed by killing wolves, followed by predation on livestock by new wolves.

“This kind of lethal control is the most expensive action that can be taken to break that cycle,” she said. Her organization would have preferred that the department use other ways to discourage wolves from killing livestock.

“The nonlethal tools change the wolves’ assessment of risk so they don’t see the livestock as easy pickings. They can be pushed back to their wild prey,” Stone said. “(The wolf kill) undermines our ability to reduce livestock conflicts overall.”

In many areas, permitted wolf hunting in Idaho is still open, following the March 15 announcement that harvesting would be allowed this year on the formerly protected predators.