Dear friend,

Today, the Center for a Humane Economy, with Animal Wellness Action, issued an offer of a $15,000 reward to any individual who provides additional evidence to police and to prosecutors about Cody Roberts that results in his being sentenced to at least one year in prison for his appalling abuse of a young, female wolf. My thanks to our member John M. Barr for committing to help with this reward fund.

By now, you know exactly who and what I am talking about. Cody Roberts ran down an adolescent female wolf with a 700-pound vehicle and stole her from her pack—from her parents and from her siblings.

He grievously wounded her, and then bound her mouth, put a shock collar on her, transported her to his home for private photos, and then left her dying in a corner of a bar as he laughed and carried on with family and friends.

There was at least one person who saw all this and was sickened. That individual provided details to the press and to Wyoming authorities, delivering photos and videos of the serial acts of cruelty. But for that person’s disgust with Roberts’ conduct, the world would not have known what transpired in rural Sublette County in Wyoming.

I extend our thanks to the person who had the courage to tell this story.

Now it’s up to each one of us to do our part, too.

The Plan to Address This Sickening Conduct

The first order of business is to prosecute and then incarcerate Cody Roberts. We provided a legal memorandum to authorities plainly determining that the law applies to a set of actions Roberts took against Theia. And now, thanks to our pressure—your pressure—in making this a global news story and social media outrage, the local authorities in Sublette County, where Roberts’ serial acts of cruelty occurred, have opened a case.

The second order of business is to change Wyoming’s anti-wolf policies, which abet the kind of hatred and zealotry and cruelty that Roberts meted out against an innocent animal.

In Wyoming, it is legal to run down a wolf with a snowmobile and ram and crush the animal. It is legal to unleash a pack of hounds to chase and maul wolves. It is legal to set out strangling neck snares. It is legal to kill them in unlimited numbers every day of the year.

Does this sound like madness to you? I know it sounds like madness to me.

The unimaginable is legal in Wyoming.

Suing the Federal Government for Dereliction of Duty

The third order of business is to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for rejecting our petition to restore federal protections for wolves in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. We told the federal government that some state policies, including Wyoming’s, were ruthless and that they should not be allowed to control the fate of wolves.

If a state doesn’t have the most elemental instincts to responsibly steward wolf populations—if it cannot even ban ramming and crushing wolves with a snowmobile—then how can that state be trusted to manage a species that is now on the federal list of endangered species in dozens of other states?

If the states are going to allow unremitting killing of species that remain on the endangered list in the vast majority of our country—removed from the federally protected list in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho because of a Congressional rider and timid action from the USFWS—then it should not be permitted to allow lawless cruelty. The animals, precisely because of the failure of state management, must be protected under federal law.

Our first tranche of evidence in making that case is the Roberts/Theia story. Roberts felt he could do anything, and that’s exactly what he did.

And today, I hope you’ll write to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and urge her to reverse her stance and to restore federal protections for wolves. We’ve made it easy for you to write her and use this form.