Ranchers: gray wolf de-listing “not a license to start killing”

If Congress were to take this adverse action, according to these scientists, it would upend two recent federal court rulings, which criticized the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for distorting the “plain meaning” of the standards of the Endangered Species Act, and admonished several state wildlife agencies for conducting overreaching and unsafe trophy-hunting and trapping programs upon federal delisting. When you take wolves’ net effect, they are profit centers to the states that are lucky enough to claim free-roaming wild wolves.

The delisting proposal is tied into the state Wolf Plan, a blueprint constructed in 2005 to design a sensible approach to wolf management. Wolves are a much beloved wilderness icon valued by the vast majority of Americans, and with only about 5,000 of them left in the lower 48 states, they should continue to receive federal protection in the places where it’s now provided.

The lawsuit also said the wildlife service failed to complete a review of the species’ endangered status that was due in 2012. More than 21 million people have viewed the documentary, How Wolves Change Rivers, showing how wolves move sedentary deer and elk populations so they don’t overgraze or browse. There are about 100 wolves in Washington and one breeding pair, including the now-famous wolf known as OR-7, with pups in southern OR and northern California. There is no general season sport hunting of wolves allowed in any phase of the Wolf Plan.

In an affront to sound science and a brazen subversion of the judicial process, Republican Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and John Barrasso of Wyoming introduced legislation this week to remove federal protections for wolves in the Great Lakes Region and Wyoming.

The vote was not unanimous.

The delisting was the proper thing for the state Fish and Wildlife Commission to do, said Todd Nash, wolf committee chairman for the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. Commissioner Greg Wolley voted not to delist, while Commissioner Laura Anderson supported delisting only in the eastern part of the state and voted against the motion.

In spite of this persecution in the northern Rockies, wolves have actually expanded their range, recolonizing portions of the Pacific Coast states that they called home prior to 1950.

“If this commission chooses to delist it will make a very sad and powerful statement about who and what it serves”, said Jonathan Jelen, development director for the conservation group Oregon Wild.

The agency has also suspended its coyote sterilization efforts in red wolf habitat, increasing the potential for wolf-coyote crossbreeding that will further endanger the species’ survival. Currently, the maximum penalty is a $6,250 fine and a year in jail, and that penalty does not change with the delisting of wolves.

The state delisting was mainly ceremonial as the state’s Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan requires more breeding pairs of wolves be found in consecutive years before OR could allow any controlled hunts of wolves in response to declines in wildlife numbers OR attacks on livestock. Only a remnant pocket in northern Minnesota remained when the species was added to the federal endangered list in 1974.