Lame Duck Threatens Wolves

Gray wolves have suffered from a long history of inhumane treatment and abuse, persecuted to near extirpation in most of this country by the 1970s. In the 1990s, wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies, and the descendants of these relocated wolves now face yet another deadly threat—and it’s being cooked up in our nation’s capital.

After a series of legal actions brought by HSUS and other animal protection and conservation organizations stopped unlawful attempts by the Fish and Wildlife Service to remove federal protections for the gray wolf, western lawmakers introduced a flurry of bills to politicize wildlife management and encourage decimation of the species. Politicians are now applying pressure in Congress to pass one of the measures—either to delist wolves entirely or just in Idaho and Montana—during the remaining days of the lame-duck session.

Under both proposals, wolf management would be turned over to the states, many of which have extremely hostile management plans that would permit the trophy hunting, inhumane trapping, and poisoning of gray wolves. In other words, the congressional bills would legalize the same actions that drove the species to the brink of extinction in the first place. And the same plans that led to the reckless killing of Yellowstone National Park’s most celebrated wolves and shattered years of critical research by wolf biologists.

As The New York Times wrote in an editorial yesterday, any form of this legislation “would set a terrible precedent, opening the door for special-interest groups to push other inconvenient species off the list. The bills would undercut one of the primary reasons for the act, which was to relieve Congress of the impossible task of legislating protections species by species and leave the final determination to scientists and wildlife management professionals.”

If passed, this legislation would not only mean the death of hundreds of wolves, but would undermine the vast protections federal law provides and weaken one of our nation’s most important and most successful conservation policies. Congress should reject these dangerous and vengeful proposals, and let wolves and other species be managed by sound science, not narrow-minded politics. It shouldn’t roll back decades of conservation law just to pacify special interests in a few states clamoring to gut wolves, allowing them to gut the entire Endangered Species Act in the process.

UPDATE (1:45 pm): Interior Secretary Ken Salazar met with the governors of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming to discuss the issue, and it appears that he signaled his support for federal legislation delisting wolves. It’s shameful that the Obama Administration, which has pledged to let science carry the day on management decisions, would line up in favor of stripping species out of the ESA by legislative fiat.