BY KAREN BOSSICK

It’s a film designed to ruffle more than a few feathers.

The short film, “The Profanity Peak Pack: Set Up & Sold Out,” zeros in on what its producers  call “an unjust and unnecessary wolf slaughter” by Washington State’s Department of Fish and Wildlife  on  public forest land in Washington State in 2016.

The film, produced by Brooks Fahy of Predator Defense, will be shown free of charge at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 10, at Ketchum’s Community Library.

It purports to show how a rancher set up a pack of wolves living on public land in a remote forest to attack his cattle. More than $135,000 of taxpayer money was spent to kill those seven wolves.

Since the government collects less than $8 per steer for four month of grazing in that area, the government would have had to collect fees from grazing rights for 17,000 cows just to break even for the aerial killing, noted Bill Clark, a wildlife consultant with the Animal Welfare Institute and a wolf researcher for more than two decades.

Killing wolves causes social disruption of the pack, often leading to more—not fewer—attacks on cattle, defenders of wolves say. And it gives wolves no way to perform their role as apex predators in the ecosystem.

The 2016 incident, which made headlines across the country, was followed by the extermination of two additional packs in 2017 in a state that has about a hundred wolves.

The presentation, presented by Western Watersheds Project, will also feature a short film about wolf reintroduction in Colorado.