Gray wolf dropped from endangered species list
WASHINGTON — Heralded as one of the greatest success stories of the Endangered Species Act, the gray wolf will lose federal protections under a federal decision announced Thursday.
The decision from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the second time in the last decade that federal wildlife officials have tried to remove gray wolves from the endangered species list, where they say the animals no longer belong now that they’re thriving in the wild.
Like the previous attempt, which took place under the Obama administration, this latest effort is expected to face legal challenges. Conservationists maintain that wolves have only returned to certain parts of their former habitat and say that the agency is acting prematurely.
“We absolutely plan to challenge it” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, chief executive of the conservation advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife and a former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Bill Clinton. “We believe they’ve declared victory too soon.”
Hunted and harassed, poisoned and trapped, gray wolves were near extinction in the continental United States by the time they were added to the endangered list in 1974. At the time, about 1,000 wolves remained. They now number more than 6,000.
“After more than 45 years as a listed species, the gray wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.
Many biologists, however, though thrilled by the population growth, say the species hasn’t fully recovered throughout its historic habitat. Before humans began a campaign to eradicate them, gray wolves roamed throughout most of the U.S.
Today, they are primarily found in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as the Northern Rockies where they have been successfully reintroduced.
But outside of these clusters, wolves haven’t established viable populations, said Joanna Lambert, a professor of animal ecology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Although parts of Colorado, Utah and California could be ideal wolf habitat, there are hardly any packs in these states. It’s unclear whether gray wolves will be able to expand their range without the federal protections they’ve had for nearly 50 years.
If the courts uphold the Trump administration’s decision, then gray wolves will be subject to individual states’ rules on hunting and trapping, as well as private land owners who run the gamut from tolerant to hostile.
In California and Washington state, wolves would still be protected under those states’ endangered species laws. But Utah allows wildlife managers to trap and euthanize wolves to prevent them from reestablishing themselves. And in Montana and Idaho, where Congress intervened to strip wolves of federal protections, nearly 500 have been killed in the past year, according to Lambert.
“I really do worry about what’s going to happen in some of these states,” she said. “There’s going to have to be a lot of eyes on the ground overseeing those populations.”
Soon after wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies in the mid-1990s, efforts began to remove their protected status. The return of the country’s most controversial predator drove a wedge between ranchers, who saw them as a threat to livestock, and environmental groups. Hunters complained about having to compete with wolves for deer and elk. In parts of the West where belief in small government is sacrosanct, the wolf became a symbol of burdensome regulation.
Many of the attempts to weaken protections were overturned by federal judges. Though wolves have been delisted in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, eastern Oregon and eastern Washington, the Obama administration’s efforts to end protection for the species in the Great Lakes region was undone by a court order in 2014.