In the last few years, I've covered the politics of wolves in Minnesota.
A new development, reported in an article republished from the Minnesota Reformer.
Biden administration upholds federal protections for wolves
by Christopher IngrahamThe U.S. Fish & Wildlife service has denied two petitions from hunting advocacy groups to reduce federal protections for gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act.
The petitions asked the agency to recognize wolves in western Great Lakes states, including Minnesota, as a distinct subpopulation and delist them, and also to reduce protections on wolves in parts of Oregon, California and Washington.
The hunters argued that wolf populations have surpassed initial recovery goals in the Great Lakes region, and that populations in the West Coast states are growing fast enough to merit downlisting.
The Fish & Wildlife Service disagreed, ruling that the petitions “do not present substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that the petitioned actions may be warranted.” The move is the latest in a longstanding tug-of-war between environmental advocates who want to see wolf populations protected, and hunters who either believe the wolves are devouring local deer populations or who simply want to shoot the animals themselves.
“Today, our federal government did not bow to the will of those who want to see wolves exterminated at the expense of sound science and ethics,” said Amanda Wright of the U.S. Humane Society, in a statement. “Gray wolves are already absent from most of their historic range. On top of that they face immense persecution from trophy hunters, trappers and agribusiness.”
The Sportsmen’s Alliance, one of the groups petitioning for reduced protections, dismissed the ruling as “a politically motivated farewell folly from the Biden administration.”
The administration, however, has a record of favoring loosened protections for wolves. Biden initially kept in place a Trump-era change that removed Endangered Species Act protections for wolves across most of the U.S. That change was ultimately reversed by a federal court in 2022.
Biden’s Department of Justice subsequently asked a federal appeals court in September to remove Endangered Species Act protections for wolves.
“The ESA (Endangered Species Act) is clear: its goal is to prevent extinction, not to restore species to their pre-western settlement numbers and range,” attorneys with the Department of Justice wrote in that petition.
In 2020, the Trump administration stripped ESA protections for most gray wolves in the U.S. Among other things, that ruling allowed the state of Wisconsin to allow a wolf hunt in February 2021. Hunters subsequently shot far more wolves than allowed by the state’s quota in a matter of days.
Conservationists point to that incident as a warning sign of what could happen if the fate of wolves is left up to the states, as the hunting groups are advocating.
Photo: A gray wolf prowls the winter forest (National Park Service photo).
This Minnesota Reformer article is republished online under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Related posts
- US Congress Committee on Natural Resources subcommittee held wolf hearing in Sandstone
- Fact check: what is the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe's stand on wolf management?
- Minnesota Deer Hunters Association creates Wolf Report website; seeks public sightings
- Another card dealt in MN wolf management story: feds agree to draft new wolf recovery plan
- MN Reformer: Maps reveal where Minnesota deer hunters struck big, and struck out
- Don Peay shows up: will Hunters4Hunters be on receiving end of Utah's $500,000 war on wolves?
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