Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced on Friday, July 16, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) plans to remove all protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for gray wolves in the eastern United States. If finalized, the proposal would leave wolves in that area bereft of federal protections; their survival would be left to individual states, the same ones that have shown these animals little mercy so far. The
gray wolf, which once ranged all across the United States in the hundreds of thousands, now numbers an estimated 3,700 individuals who dwell in only a few regions. Those meager numbers were apparently sufficient for the USFWS to claim victory; last year, the agency
downlisted the gray wolf from endangered to threatened in most states and set the wheels in motion for the proposed delisting.
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In a way, delisting the wolf in this eastern region might seem odd since the wolf population in most of these states hovers right around zero. Even the term "eastern region" is strange; the area is much larger than you might imagine, stretching from as far west as the Dakotas to Maine and other northeastern states. But in another way, the delisting proposal is deadly serious, since the region also includes Minnesota, home to 2,400 gray wolves. Minnesota is one of three states in the eastern region with a wolf management plan, which will guide wolf management after federal delisting; these plans will allow for liberal lethal wolf control, including recreational hunting and trapping.
The USFWS has also been waffling for years over the possibility of reintroducing wolves to northeastern states from which the animal has long been absent. Delisting would make such a reintroduction virtually impossible and would put up roadblocks even for natural recolonization of these areas via dispersal of wolves from Canada. The theory is that states, without federal support and protections, would have little interest in providing the type of management required to reintroduce wolves.
Conservation Victory or a Work in Progress?
Though it would be nice to celebrate a victory under the ESA with the recovery of the gray wolf, many conservationists and scientists consider delisting premature because gray wolves still face many threats to their long-term survival.
One threat is habitat. Because suitable habitat for wolves (and other wildlife) is highly fragmented, with few protected corridors, dispersal of wolves—and therefore gene flow among populations—is limited. Instead of reducing ESA protections, the federal government should create more protected corridors.
Simply put, most of the wolf populations in the lower 48 states are small and partially isolated. This could jeopardize the long-term viability of the gray wolf in the United States.
What's more, recent research suggests that even wolves in Yellowstone National Park are not yet fully integrated into the ecosystem compared with their Canadian counterparts. So even if we could live with small population sizes and the partial isolation, some scientists suggest that ecosystems, long missing this key carnivore, are not yet recovered.
But all of the wolves in the lower 48 states—even Minnesota's relatively robust population—are at risk if the delisting plan is finalized. Why? One simple reason: Humans who share space with wolves are not ready to coexist with the animal, and this will be quite evident after the removal of ESA protections.
"Coexistence with large predators requires human tolerance and education regarding the means by which human-wolf conflicts may be avoided," says Bette Stallman, HSUS wildlife biologist. "That willingness to coexist has not been developed in any portion of the gray wolf's range; therefore, simply restoring a certain "magic number" of wolves to a region may not be enough."
While the majority of the country supports wolf protection and conservation efforts, a handful of individuals claiming to represent the interests of hunters and livestock producers have been outspoken in their opposition to wolf recovery and protection. These "anti-wolf" interests misrepresent science on predator-prey relationships to suggest that wolves will cause drastic declines in populations of deer and other favored "game" species, supposedly eliminating opportunities for hunters to kill these animals. Wolf opponents also exaggerate the incidence of wolf depredations on livestock, ignoring ongoing innovations in non-lethal methods for livestock protection that are used successfully by an increasing number of producers living in wolf habitat.
A Sad State of Affairs
When wolf management is turned over to state authorities, their wolf management plans (which have been in the works for years in some states) will automatically go into effect. States within historical gray wolf range are required to develop regulatory mechanisms to ensure that wolf populations are not, once again, threatened with extinction.
But the USFWS has required such regulatory mechanisms—expressed in state wolf management plans—only of those states that are currently home to a recognized wolf population. This means that when the gray wolf is delisted, the northeastern states and the Dakotas, among others, will not be required to provide any protection for wolves that may naturally disperse there.
In the eastern region where delisting has been proposed, only Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota are home to recognized wolf populations, so only these states have developed plans. Though the plans include some positive elements, they would also allow for sport hunting, recreational trapping, and non-selective lethal predator control methods, including payment for predator control. In other words, state plans would allow for a return to the same practices that first imperiled the wolf.
What's more, state plans are not set in stone. They may be modified over the years; what little protection plans do provide would be subject to modification or simply a lack of funding at the whim of state legislatures.
Hunting and trapping are not necessary to control the wolf population. Wolf populations are "regulated" by natural factors such as prey availability (which is itself affected by wolf population size and weather) and naturally occurring diseases. For example, the wolf population in Minnesota may already be stable or declining, perhaps largely because the animals have saturated available habitat or due to an outbreak of mange.
"State and federal agencies must be held accountable for preserving the gray wolf by establishing humane, realistic policies for managing wolf populations," The HSUS's Stallman says. "Pandering to fears that are based on misinformation rather than science will neither ensure the recovery of the gray wolf nor address legitimate human-wolf conflicts."
The USFWS will be accepting public comments until November 18 and holding public hearings between August 31 and October 6.
