Federal judge blasts agency, says endangered wolves cannot be shot

THE CRITICALLY endangered American red wolf might have been saved from extinction on Monday.

In a scathing court decision, a federal judge in North Carolina ripped the Interior Department’s management of the last red wolf population in the wild on Monday, saying that an agency sworn to uphold a congressional mandate to preserve the animals violated it over and over, and even gave private landowners the right to shoot and kill them.

Chief Judge Terrence Boyle reminded the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which gave the authorisation, of its own statement in 1999. “Wildlife are not the property of landowners but belong to the public and are managed by state and federal governments for the public good,” he wrote. Boyle ruled that a temporary injunction issued against Fish and Wildlife’s shoot-to-kill authorisation in 2016 is now permanent. The agency must prove a wolf is a threat to humans or livestock before it can make a decision to take its life.

Deciding in favour of the Red Wolf Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Welfare Institute – conservation groups that sued Fish and Wildlife – Boyle said the agency violated a rule passed by Congress to resurrect them, protect them, conserve the species and determine the impact of allowing people to slaughter the few that remain in and around the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina.

Red wolves once roamed the entire southeastern United States before government-sanctioned hunting programmes all but eliminated them. In the late 1970s, a few wolves were captured and bred in zoos. An experimental population was released into the North Carolina refuge.

In what was hailed as a biological success, two breeding pairs expanded to nearly 140 in the early 2000s.

But in 2012, as a few private landowners and state wildlife officials put pressure on the service to end the programme in North Carolina, the population went into a startling decline. — WPBloomberg