Wolves Given a Break

A federal judge in Oakland, CA has ruled that grey wolves in much of the USA must be restored to federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. Judge Jeffery White said that the US Fish & Wildlife Service had failed to show that wolf populations could be sustained in the Midwest and portions of the West without federal protection. Unfortunately his ruling does not apply to wolves in the Northern Rockies where they face severe persecution once again under so-called state management. The former guy stripped wolves of their protection in the waning days of his regime.  Conservation organization promptly sued to reestablish their status under law.  Wolf recovery after centuries of persecution by settlers, farmers, ranchers and hunters is widely viewed as a conservation success story.

The ruling will most immediately affect the Great Lakes region where relaxed hunting regulation led to the slaughter of over 218 wolves over four days in Wisconsin, reminiscent of the bounty hunting that occurred in the 1930s. President of the Farm Bureau said the ruling re-establishing grey wolves to protected status was "extremely disappointing". None of the Great Lakes states with wolf populations had scheduled additional hunting seasons prior to the ruling, but a local politician from the Upper Peninsula took umbrage at the ruling coming from "some judge thousands of miles away" but still in the same country.  Michigan officials want some finality on the wolves' status before attempting to regulate their management given the history of legal challenges to their delisting. [photo courtesy National Park Service]

The wolves living in the Northern Rockies will have to wait for the USFWS to finish its review of grey wolf recovery.  Interior Secretary Deb Haaland ordered the review after Idaho and Montana issued rules intended to drastically reduce the number of wolves in their states.  This year in Montana, a record number of wolves were killed after they wandered outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park where they were first re-established in 1995. The Secretary wrote in an editorial that,“Recent laws passed in some Western states undermine state wildlife managers by promoting precipitous reductions in wolf populations, such as removing bag limits, baiting, snaring, night hunting and pursuit by dogs — the same kind of practices that nearly wiped out wolves during the last century,” Wolves once roamed the entire US before European settlement. Today they occupy a fraction of the historic range. A remanent population in the Great Lakes has expanded to an estimated 4,400, and an estimated 2,000 wolves occupy six states in the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest as result of recovery efforts.