Feds say gray wolves ‘have recovered’
Federal wildlife officials aim to remove endangered species protections for gray wolves across the U.S. this year.
“We’re working hard to have this done by the end of the year, and I’d say it’s very imminent,” Aurelia Skipwith, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said this week.
The agency wants to return management authority of the wolves to the states. Skipwith said that the wolf has “biologically recovered” and that its removal from the list would demonstrate the effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act.
Shot, trapped and poisoned to near extinction in the past century, wolves in recent decades rebounded in the western Great Lakes region and portions of the West. The total population exceeds 6,000.
Wildlife protection groups were not pleased with the announcement.
“History tells us that under the states’ authority to manage wolf populations, wolves die at the hands of trophy hunters,” the Wolf Conservation Center tweeted Tuesday.
Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “by stripping wolves of endangered species protections, decades of work to restore these ecologically important icons of the wild will be undone with the stroke of a pen.”
“Most Americans want wolves to remain protected, not gunned down for sport,” Adkins said. “Yet by declaring it open season on wolves, the Trump administration is catering to trophy hunters and the livestock industry. “We’ll do everything we can to fight this cruel and misguided policy change.”
The American Farm Bureau Federation supports the decision to delist the gray wolf from endangered species protection.
“Populations have reached critically high numbers in many states – so high, in fact, that wolves are not just preying on livestock, but pushing elk and deer onto U.S. farms and ranches, which leads to even more destruction,” bureau president Zippy Duvall said in a statement in 2019.