Defenders Magazine
Get Defenders Headlines
Get the latest wildlife conservation news and information... right when we post it online.
Defenders Magazine
Defenders in Action: Defenders Takes Action to Halt Wolf Killing in Rockies
With dozens of wolves in the northern Rockies shot this spring, Defenders of Wildlife has taken legal action to save the imperiled animals. Defenders and other conservation groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, seeking to reverse the agency's decision to strip Endangered Species Act protection from the gray wolf population in the northern Rockies.
Within 61 days of delisting on March 28, 69 wolves were killed, including a famous member of the Druid pack from Yellowstone National Park, known to wolf-watchers as Limpy.
Wolves in Wyoming can now be shot on sight, year-round and for no particular reason in 88 percent of the state. State management plans in Idaho and, to a lesser extent, in Montana also do not adequately protect wolves. For example, under a new state code in Idaho, wolves can be killed for simply annoying or worrying livestock. Wolves have also lost federal protection in portions of Oregon, Washington and Utah—states where populations were never reestablished.
"This is a major setback for wolves," says Suzanne Stone, Defenders' northern Rockies wolf representative. "Wolves can now be killed without justification and we risk ending up right back where we started, with wolves back on the endangered species list."
Conservation groups believe that wolves should remain under federal protection because state management plans are largely hostile to wolf conservation. A policy that allows for the massive killing of wolves also eliminates the likelihood that northern Rocky wolves could establish connections with Canadian wolf populations or that they could repopulate Oregon, Washington, Utah and Colorado.
"It's taken 13 years of hard work to finally reach the point where wolves are beginning to expand into more of their historic range in other states," says Stone. "Delisting under these current plans threatens all this progress."
More than 200,000 gray wolves once lived throughout the United States but federal eradication campaigns eliminated them from most of the country by the 1930s. Wolves had been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1974, and were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995 and 1996.
For more information, visit www.defenders.org/nrwolves.
