The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission’s Dec. 14 conclusion that it wasn’t necessary to change the state’s wolf management plan is reasonable. But that’s not to say there aren’t serious problems state officials need to address regarding wolves in Northeast Oregon.

Since Oct. 1, wolves from three packs that roam in northern Baker County and southern Union County have killed nine head of cattle and injured two others, and killed eight sheep and injured two others. Most of the attacks happened on private property.

The packs are Frazier Mountain, Black Pines and Keating.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife didn’t ignore these chronic depredations, to be sure.

In late November and early December, agency employees killed six wolves from the Black Pines Pack, after a rancher who lost livestock to the wolves requested a kill permit.

Then, on Dec. 21, ODFW issued a second permit, allowing up to two wolves from the Frazier Mountain Pack to be killed. The permit is valid until Jan. 31, 2024, or until two wolves are killed, whichever comes first.

There is no current kill permit in effect for the Keating Pack. It hasn’t been implicated in any livestock attacks since Oct. 20.

In one sense, these episodes show that the state’s wolf plan is working as it’s intended to. The plan allows ODFW to issue kill permits for wolves in packs that have attacked livestock at least two times in a nine-month period. Besides that threshold, agency biologists must determine that livestock owners have used nonlethal methods, such as hazing wolves, installing deterrents such as flags or noisemakers, or moving livestock if practical.

But the situation where Baker and Union counties meet near Medical Springs, and on both sides of that border, is troubling.

With wolves from three packs in a relatively small area, and each pack having shown a propensity for attacking livestock, killing wolves from individual packs might not be sufficient to curb the depredations. Not even when, as in the case of the Black Pines Pack, state officials killed half of the known population in that pack.

ODFW might need instead to try to eliminate one or more packs altogether.

This would pose no threat to Oregon’s wolf population, certainly.

The state has enough wolves in the northeast corner — where a large majority of Oregon’s wolves have lived since the first animal migrated from Idaho in 1999 — that earlier this month Oregon officials allowed their counterparts from Colorado to trap 10 wolves here and release them in Colorado.

None of those 10 wolves came from the Black Pines, Frazier Mountain or Keating packs.

According to ODFW, the federal USDA Wildlife Services agency will be “bringing in additional specialists focused on nonlethal resources to reduce wolf-livestock conflict.”

That has potential.

But as local ranchers have seen over the past few months, nonlethal methods won’t always deter wolves.

And culling, rather than removing, wolf packs might also prove ineffective when multiple packs’ ranges overlap and coincide with areas where cattle and sheep are kept in winter pastures.

ODFW acknowledges how vital it is to reduce wolf attacks on livestock.

In a press release announcing that the commission won’t revise the wolf plan, ODFW noted that “managing wolf-livestock conflict and reducing the burden on landowners and producers will be critical for the long-term conservation of wolves in Oregon.”

That conflict is acute in our region. Conceding the problem exists, though, is insufficient. ODFW leaders need to recognize that they might need to employ more aggressive techniques in their search for a solution.