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The political assault on the West's wolves is spiraling out of control -- right-wing politicians are pushing new legislation from all angles to legalize wolf slaughter from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Northwest. If they strip federal protections and turn wolf management over to the states, wandering wolves like OR-7 and his new family would be directly at risk. The 40-year project to return wolves to their native home across the West needs your help.
We set up the Predator Defense Fund to ramp up our efforts in this battle, and your support right now is crucial.
The new raft of sneaky laws would end federal protection of wolves in Oregon, Utah, Washington, Arizona and New Mexico, turning the West into a minefield for wolves who could be shot, trapped and poisoned simply by stepping across a state line. There are only 155 wolves left across more than 250,000 square miles of the West -- these social animals would be under constant threat as they migrate, seek mates, start families and struggle to reclaim their historic range.
No organization has fought harder for wolves in the West than the Center for Biological Diversity, and your help with the Predator Defense Fund will give us the resources we need for the coming battles in this war.
Wolf haters in Congress are doing an end run around the Endangered Species Act -- the powerful law that is one of our most effective tools for saving vulnerable wildlife from extinction. If these extremists can pass legislation ending federal protection for wolves, they will have succeeded in elevating politics and corporate interests over wildlife science. And make no mistake, they'll swiftly move on to other species -- gleefully taking apart the Act one animal at a time. That's why when we protect wolves, we protect all endangered species.
We're not going to let them get away with this. The Center's lawyers, scientists and activists are making sure these backdoor shenanigans don't succeed, that wolves are safe, and that scientists, not congressmen, are the ones deciding which species need protection. And we know how to do it. Just last year we ended wolf hunting in Wyoming, stopped a predator killing contest in Idaho and helped win endangered species status for wolves in California -- paving the way for OR-7 and his young pack to return.
Giving to the Predator Defense Fund is the best thing you can do today to protect wolves and strengthen the Endangered Species Act. Wolves need your help.
Room to Roam for Mexican Wolves
In the late spring of 2004, a pioneering young Mexican wolf and her mate staked out new territory on the western slope of New Mexico’s San Mateo Mountains. The pair, two of the less than 50 Mexican wolves in existence in the wild, preyed on the mountain range’s abundant elk and deer and started a family—the San Mateo Pack—in their new home overlooking the Aldo Leopold Wilderness to the west and the Rio Grande valley to the east.
The only problem for the newly formed San Mateo Pack is that they settled outside an invisible and arbitrary boundary that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set determining where Mexican wolves may, and may not, live.
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The wolves bothered no one—not even the area’s few ranchers—but still federal wolf bureaucrats trapped and relocated the pair in August 2004 and again in the summer of 2005 to an area within the arbitrary boundaries the government designated as acceptable for Mexican wolves to inhabit. Sadly, one of those translocations caused the death of their young pups.
Wolf scientists knew the boundary was arbitrary and recommended over and over again that the boundary be removed and Mexican wolves be granted the room to roam they need to fully recover as a species.
This January the Service updated its Mexican wolf regulations. Finally heeding the wisdom of wolf ecologists, they removed the old boundary. Incredibly, the Service created another equally arbitrary boundary (although encompassing a larger area) that once again limits where Mexican wolves can live. As a point of reference, no other endangered large carnivore, much less one of the most endangered ones, has a boundary for where it can and cannot live.
That’s why earlier this month WildEarth Guardians, joined by the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and Friends of Animals, and represented by our own attorneys and the Western Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Service to overturn the artificial geographic limits, and many other equally arbitrary and deeply flawed aspects of the new rule governing Mexican wolf recovery in the American Southwest.
While geographic limits undermine wolf conservation the rule’s newly designated artificial cap on the Mexican wolf population really gets my blood to boil. At the 11th hour in the agencies’ multi-year planning process, and with essentially no opportunity for public input, the Service adopted a population cap of 300-325 wolves! At a time when the science is saying we need more wolves in many more places why does the Service continue to come up with half measures based on half-truths?
But the Service’s new Mexican wolf regulations get even worse.
The new rule flagrantly ignores the Endangered Species Act’s requirement that reintroduced, or “experimental” populations, that are “essential” to the species survival in the wild be designated as “essential” rather than the much less protective “non-essential” designation under the Act.
How can the only wild Mexican wolf population not be essential to the species survival in the wild? It’s outrageous!
The Service cynically claims that animals in zoos and breeding facilities somehow ensure the species’ survival even when the Endangered Species Act requires that it make the determination of “essential/non-essential” based on populations in the wild. That’s why, even though thousands of people and dozens of environmental groups asked the agency to consider the benefits of the “essential” designation when it completed its Environmental Impact Statement, it ignored those pleas.
The more protective “essential” designation would mean that some of the biggest threats to the Mexican wolf—such as coyote hunting, trapping, livestock grazing permitted by the U.S. Forest Service and activities carried out by the federal animal damage control agency—would be subject to greater scrutiny.
Incredibly the original alpha female of the San Mateo Pack is still alive, though her first mate was killed by a government trapper and another was killed by a poacher.
She now roams the Mangas Mountains, with another mate, in the northern portion of the Gila National Forest.
While the current, politically defined wolf recovery boundary at Interstate-40—a mere 85 miles to her north—may no longer threaten her given her age, it may well endanger her off-spring as they seek to reclaim their historic homelands just as she and her mate once did.
George Santayana, the Spanish philosopher and essayist once said: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The San Mateo Pack’s story of tragedy, recovery, and resilience is history that we will not forget.
That’s why we’re fighting in court to overturn the artificial geographic boundary, the arbitrary population cap and the “non-essential” designation—and other flaws in the Mexican wolf recovery framework as well. We believe that the foundation for the recovery of the Mexican wolf simply needs to be stronger. With your voice, and ours, we’ll get there.
