Wolves, the Law, and the Incompatibility of Hatred and Stewardship

In a detailed and damning 105-page ruling issued yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy in Montana took the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to task for illegally denying protections to gray wolves in the western United States. He reminded us that in the 1930s, gray wolves were driven to near extinction, holding on only in the far reaches of northeast Minnesota in the lower 48 states. That was no accident of history or the consequence of ecological change. It came “at hands of men,” Judge Molloy wrote, “acting on an anti-predator narrative, not science.”

Today, in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, there’s palpable animus toward wolves and the stirrings of hatred and persecutionn — legalizing year-round killing, using snowmobiles to exhaust and run over and crush wolves, turning packs of dogs loose to engage in open-air fights with them, baiting neck snares and steel-jawed traps, and paying bounties for a piece of their hides.

None of that can be classed as sound conservation. It all adds up to a scorched earth policyn—nnmaliciously aimed at the first species in the human story to exhibit sociability with us, which ultimately led to the domestication of dogs and the joyous and life-changing relationships we have with their descendants.

Judge Molloy was methodical in his criticisms of the FWS in siding with Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy, and other plaintiffs and remanding the question of restoring federal protections for wolves back to the agency for re-examination. “The state management regimes in Montana and Idaho changed dramatically in 2021, resurrecting many of the management practices and policies responsible for the prior extirpation of the gray wolf from the West,” Molloy wrote. Animal Wellness Action attorney Kate Schultz, who argued our case before Judge Molloy, noted that “the Fish and Wildlife Service has two choices right now: appeal to the Ninth Circuit, or go straight back to the drawing board. The district court here found the Service’s analysis was riddled with errors.”

My colleague noted that high degree of difficulty in the FWS taking a course other than restoring federal protections for wolves. “It’s like trying to cure a cancer that has metastasized to nearly every organ system. The agency’s line of argument was flawed at its core. It just doesn’t get it, and it seems to have excused the states’ unacceptable policies without warrant.”

Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy led one of three tranches of animal welfare and environmental groups who sued the FWS in this case. But if there was any one incident that caused us to say “Enough!” and to take on this case, it was the reprehensible actions of a Wyoming man named Cody Roberts.

Early last year, Roberts, who was better known as a hound hunter of lions, ran over a young female wolf with his snowmobile. After crushing her but not killing her, he took her captive, taped her mouth shut, dragged her into a bar, and tortured her for hours before finally killing her in the dim light behind the building where he had celebrated the mortal injuries he had inflicted on her for no good reason.

Despite our demands for justice, and a worldwide spotlight on Roberts’ savagery, state authorities took no practical action to address his handiwork — declining to pass a sound state law to forbid chasing down wolves and other wildlife with snowmobiles. There were some politicians who spoke up about the cruelty, but they quickly backpedaled as the shrill voices of the ranching community opposed doing anything substantive. Jim Magagna, the executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, told legislators that “… we’re seeing attacks on the tools that we’ve used. … We simply cannot afford, as an industry, to lose more of the tools that we may need.” The lobbyist for the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, in speaking about a measure to forbid using snowmobiles to run down animals, said, “I don’t think this bill is needed.”

Then a federal lawmaker representing Wyoming denounced a federal bill, the Snowmobiles Aren’t Weapons Act, to ban the use of motorized vehicles to chase down wolves with snowmobiles on federal lands, claiming that, “Our Western issues and way of life is completely foreign” to proponents of this legislation.

The effect of these comments was to remind so many observers that these states have no guardrails for wolves, and they don’t plan to build those guardrails anytime soon. They treat the wolves not as wildlife to be managed but as trespassers to be wiped out — even the wolves who stray just across the border of Yellowstone National Park and onto other federal lands abutting it. Even Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, unethically trapped a wolf right outside of Yellowstone, apparently without any concern that wolf-watching in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone generates tens of millions of dollars in economic activity for rural gateway communities.

Wolves Are Nature’s Frontline Defense Against Disease

With all the vitriol and false claims from wolf haters, one crucial behavioral truth has been subordinated in the debate: wolves not only bring a broad array of benefits to ecosystems, in terms of stream and forest health, but they are our best line of defense against the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a contagious, fatal neurological disease now quietly eating away at the brains of deer and elk across the West.

CWD first disorients infected animals and then kills them. There is no cure. No vaccine. The disease is so dangerous and moving so inexorably that it threatens the long-term viability of deer and elk populations. That means it indirectly threatens a hunting industry that generates hundreds of millions in revenue and that is so culturally significant in rural parts of the West. Some scientists also warn of CWD’s zoonotic transfer potential — meaning that hunters and hunting families risk consuming the infectious prion and contracting the human variant of the disease. CWD has hit elk in 34 states and provinces, and it’s on the march.

Nature though does have one trump card to play: active predation from wolves and lions.

Gray wolves selectively prey on animals afflicted by CWD, removing them from the population and deactivating the deadly prions. It’s ecological cleansing at its finest—and it comes free of charge to state wildlife agencies. As Dr. Jim Keen, our director of veterinary sciences, puts it: “The predatory behavior of wolves may be the only way to arrest the spread of CWD and cleanse wild cervid populations of this brain-wasting disease.”

Disease biogeography shows that CWD prevalence is significantly lower, or non-existent, in regions where wolves and other large predators are present in healthy numbers. In the Upper Great Lakes region, for example, where gray wolves prey on white-tailed deer, the disease has been kept largely at bay. And in Greater Yellowstone — where wolves, mountain lions, and bears maintain ecological balance — deer and elk herds are far healthier than in predator-depleted areas outside of the park.

Even major pro-hunting groups like the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership have called CWD “the biggest threat to the future of deer hunting.” Yet states like Montana and Idaho continue to actively incentivize people to wage war on the very predators who keep disease in check. It requires a special measure of disassociation to tout a commitment to hunting rights while assaulting the species that, at no cost, protects the long-term viability of deer and elk populations that sustain the quarry needed for the hunt. 

A Critical Moment for Wolves — and for Wildlife Policy

Judge Molloy’s ruling is an important ruling, but its effects are unclear. It could be a cautionary treatise about Congress’s ham-handed intervention in ESA listing matters. It was, after all, a legislative rider in 2011 that removed federal protections for wolves in the northern Rockies and sent us down the path that Molloy summarized in such detail yesterday.

To be sure, the Molloy ruling will influence the debate over H.R. 845, introduced by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and S. 1306, introduced by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., to remove federal protections for wolves across their range outside of the northern Rockies. If the delisting experiment with the northern Rockies failed so badly, as evinced by Molloy’s dressing down of the FWS, we should not replicate that same sort of politically driven delisting action and toss that stink bomb into a dozen other states.

If you care about wolves, the most urgent fight is to block H.R. 845 and S. 1306 and not to allow Congress to repeat its prior error in prematurely removing federal protections for wolves in the northern Rockies.

The reality is, wolves take very few livestock, and when they do, the best response is site-specific deterrents. Random shooting of wolves is likely to do little good to protect herds, but using guard dogs, fladry, or even drones to scare off wolves would be much more effective.

The sensible strategy is to allow wolves to thrive and to focus their predatory instincts on deer and elk. Two weeks ago, scientists reported on the restoration of the aspen overstory in Yellowstone, enabled by wolf predation on previously unmolested elk and deer populations who had changed the composition of the forest to the detriment of other species.

The Molloy ruling is a reminder that the political opposition to the Snowmobiles Aren’t Weapons (SAW) Act is just petulant. Who among any of us, no matter of our ideology or home-state affections, can say that running down an animal is anything but pure barbarism? That’s no western tradition or a state prerogative. It’s sadistic and in the same pathological category as dogfighting or cockfighting.

Montana’s recent announcement about a potential increase in its statewide wolf quota will only further imperil the state’s authority when it comes to wolf management. Judge Molloy scolded the FWS and, by implication, Montana for its policies. To make them even more extreme is just one more provocation.