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On Monday, environmental organizations filed two lawsuits against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), challenging its decision not to restore Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves in the West. Currently, gray wolves are listed as endangered in 44 states and threatened in Minnesota. In Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and portions of Eastern Oregon and Washington, wolf management is under state jurisdiction.
The environmental groups claim that the analyses conducted by the USFWS failed to accurately consider the increasingly aggressive measures that states like Montana and Idaho have taken to substantially reduce wolf numbers. Montana has legalized the use of neck snares, hunting with bait, night hunting, and even authorized the reimbursement of wolf hunters' expenses. In Idaho, the use of all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, and dogs to hunt wolves is allowed.
Similar authorizations have been made in Wyoming, where recently a man intentionally hit a wolf with his snowmobile, taped its mouth shut, then brought it to a nearby bar before killing it. The man received a ticket for violating laws prohibiting the possession of live wildlife, but the killing of the wolf was not considered an offense.
“The end goal of the wolf ‘management plans’ in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming is to once again exterminate them from the Northern Rockies,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “They think the only good wolf is a dead wolf.”
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I think the idea is just getting out there into this harsh environment on your own, the things you’re going to experience are unique to the desert… Like, I wouldn’t shut my eyes at night until I got to see one shooting star. It’s things like that that you just aren’t going to find anywhere else.”
