Gray Wolves in the West Need Federal Protection
By Ted Williams
On June 18th, conservation groups urged Judge Donald Molloy of the U.S. District Court for Montana to overturn a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finding that western gray wolves do not merit listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The Administrative Procedures Act requires courts to declare unlawful any agency action that is “arbitrary and capricious.” The plaintiffs presented compelling evidence that the Service’s action was precisely that.
What’s more, the ESA requires that decisions to list or not list a species be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available.” In hatching its decision to deny wolves ESA protection, the Service ignored scientific data collected by its own biologists. It even ignored commercial data such as the fact that 150,000 people visit Yellowstone National Park each year specifically to see wolves, thereby providing $35 million in annual tourist revenue to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
By the Service’s own estimate, wolves in the entire West number only 2,797 compared to an original population that likely exceeded 380,000. A wolf pack relies on one breeding pair for reproduction — the alpha male and alpha female. So loss of a single breeder reduces population growth and destabilizes social structure.
The current estimated population of 2,797 western wolves means that the number of breeders able to sustain the population is well under 500. Such a population is not viable. It’s too small, declining and confined to only about ten percent of western wolf range.
No competent wildlife biologist would ever assert that 2,797 wolves across the entire West is a sufficiently large population that is well connected and able to adapt, but so the Service asserts. This notion did not issue from biologists. It issued instead from the agency’s lay bureaucrats pressured by politicians and wolf haters.
Science has rarely influenced federal wolf management. Almost every decision to list or delist wolves has been made strictly in response to litigation, public pressure or intervention by Congress.
An exception was the Carter administration’s 1978 decision to list wolves in the contiguous states as endangered except in Minnesota, where it listed them as threatened.
In 2011, Congress delisted wolves in Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and northern Utah via a rider added by Congressman Mike Simpson (R-ID) tacked onto a federal spending bill. A year later, wolves lost ESA protection in Wyoming when the Service declared the population recovered and transferred management authority to the state.
Then, in 2020, the Trump administration issued a rule, bereft of science, proposing to delist all other wolves in the contiguous states. That rule was invalidated by the courts but is currently under appeal. So, at least for now, wolves retain threatened status in Minnesota and endangered status in all contiguous states save those of the Northern Rockies.
In 2021, Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy, Project Coyote, Kettle Range Conservation Group, Footloose Montana, Gallatin Wildlife Association — along with dozens of other conservation outfits — filed a petition with the Service requesting endangered status for wolves in the western United States.
The Service failed to meet its mandated deadline to decide whether western wolves warrant ESA protection. So in 2022, the petitioners sued.
Last year the Service arbitrarily and capriciously denied ESA protection for western wolves — this despite the fact that it had found that listing “may be warranted” and despite the fact that its own biologists had reported that essentially unrestricted wolf slaughter, now legal and encouraged in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, could reduce the region’s wolf population to as few as 667.
These three states treat wolves as vermin, and that’s the major threat to western wolf viability. In Montana, wolf quotas are increasingly liberal. In 2023 alone, a quarter of the state’s wolves were killed. Montana’s wolf population is declining by about 100 animals per year.
Wyoming enacted legislation providing for a wolf population of only ten breeding pairs or 100 wolves. Idaho enacted legislation providing for only 15 breeding pairs or 150 wolves. Genetically viable populations cannot exist with these numbers.
In Idaho and Wyoming, one may collect bounties by choking wolves to death with neck snares, gunning them down from helicopters, shooting them at night, tearing them apart with dogs, burning pups and nursing mothers in their dens, and leghold trapping. In all but 15 percent of Wyoming, wolves are classified as “predatory animals” in need of extermination. And it’s legal to chase wolves down and injure or kill them with snowmobiles — a popular sport known as “wolf whacking.”
“When Wyoming allows limitless crushing of wolves with snowmobiles hurtling at 60 miles an hour, that tells us all we need to know about state stewardship of wolves in the Northern Rockies. This isn’t wildlife management; it is a free-for-all, with traps, packs of dogs, snowmobiles, clubbing and burning of pups in dens, and killing 365 days a year, including midnight terror with men chasing down wolves with night-vision goggles. Please let me not hear one more word that there’s a whiff of science or management associated with these wolf pogroms.”
This from Wayne Pacelle, president and founder of Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy: “When Wyoming allows limitless crushing of wolves with snowmobiles hurtling at 60 miles an hour, that tells us all we need to know about state stewardship of wolves in the Northern Rockies. This isn’t wildlife management; it is a free-for-all, with traps, packs of dogs, snowmobiles, clubbing and burning of pups in dens, and killing 365 days a year, including midnight terror with men chasing down wolves with night-vision goggles. Please let me not hear one more word that there’s a whiff of science or management associated with these wolf pogroms.”
The 2009 rule delisting Northern Rocky Mountain wolves included a mandated pledge by the Service that “if a state changed their regulatory framework to authorize the unlimited and unregulated taking of wolves … emergency listing would be immediately pursued.”
The Service flung down and danced upon that pledge, sitting on its hands for 15 years while Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming conducted what amounted to wolf extermination. The agency then denied the petition for ESA protection, offering this explanation of why it should not have done so: “The states of Montana and Idaho recently adopted laws and regulations designed to substantially reduce the gray wolf populations in their states, using means and measures that are at odds with modern professional wildlife management.”
In the same press release the Service further elucidated its bumbling, derelict wolf management with this statement: “Courts have invalidated five out of six rules finalized by the Service on gray wolf status, citing at least in part a failure to consider how delisting any particular population of gray wolves affects their status and recovery nationwide.”
An estimated 2,383 wolves — about 85 percent of the western population — persist in the Northern Rockies. This means that everywhere else in the West, the estimated population is only 414.
All this sparsely occupied habitat is, of course, wolf range because it historically teemed with wolves. But the Service has arbitrarily and capriciously proclaimed that it doesn’t “consider unoccupied historical range or unoccupied suitable habitat as potentially significant portions.” That’s nonsensical. The southern Rockies contain tens of thousands of square miles of prime wolf habitat that once supported thousands of wolves and could do so again.
And while the Service has identified the West Coast as potentially significant wolf habitat, it has arbitrarily and capriciously proclaimed that West Coast wolves are neither endangered nor threatened, ignoring the fact that a dearth of connectivity and the small population size endangers them.
The current mess is succinctly summed up as follows by Dan Ashe, who served as director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Obama: “This isn’t about wolves. It’s just politics. People want to be mad at the federal government, and wolves have become their abused dog to kick and they are kicking it hard.”
Ted Williams is a lifelong hunter and a former information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. He writes exclusively about fish and wildlife and serves on the Circle of Chiefs of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.