By Blair Miller DAILY MONTANAN
Another coalition of conservation groups, including several from Montana, has given notice to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service it plans to sue to try and force the agency to give Endangered Species Act protections back to gray wolves in Montana and other states in the West.
The group, which includes the Gallatin Wildlife Association and Footloose Montana, is the third to threaten or file a lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife Service since it in February announced that there was a Western distinct population segment of gray wolves but it would not be making any changes to their listing status—something many western conservation groups have been pushing for for years.
The group said its notice of intent to sue also comes in response to an incident in Wyoming in late February in which a man ran down a young wolf on his snowmobile, taped its mouth shut, took the injured wolf to a local bar to show it off to patrons, and later killed the animal, as WyoFile has reported.
So far, the man’s only punishment has been a $250 fine. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department said earlier this month the incident did not represent Wyoming and “overshadows our state’s proven track record and dedication to the conservation service.”
But the groups that have long asked for more protections for gray wolves in the West, especially since they have been under state management in Montana and Idaho since 2011 and in Wyoming since 2017, say the killing in Wyoming is another sign that state management policies are not working.
“States have proven they cannot be trusted to sustain the wolf species. They not only allow but endorse bounties on wolves. They have encouraged increased hunting quotas on wolves, spotlighting, baiting, trapping, snaring, hound hunting,” said Footloose Montana executive director Jessica Karjala in a statement. “Here, Wyoming is turning a blind eye to the heinous acts of Cody Roberts. The delisting of wolves has led to the failure of state wildlife agencies to protect wolves.”
In early February, the Fish and Wildlife Service released its decision not to list wolves in the West as a threatened species, but said it would develop a National Recovery Plan for wolves in the lower 48 states. It said its projections showed there was “no risk of quasi-extinction in the next 100 years” for wolves, so extra protections were not necessary.
Gray wolves are listed as a threatened species in Minnesota and endangered in 44 states, but they are managed by the states in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and the easter thirds of Oregon and Washington.
The review found there were about 2,800 wolves living in seven states at the end of 2022, and that even if hunting and trapping continues to the current extent in Montana and Idaho, the median wolf population in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming would be between 935 and 2,161 wolves.
Under the most extreme harvest scenario, the population was modeled to be around 739, and under the least extreme scenario, up to nearly 2,600 wolves, according to the decision and a species status assessment.
The 19-page notice of intent to sue was written by Kate Chupka Schultz, the senior attorney for the Center for a Humane Economy, which is one of five groups behind this week’s letter. It accuses the Fish and Wildlife Service of failing to duly consider how increasing hunting and trapping quotas and the conflicting politics surrounding wolves in the West could affect wolf populations and their interconnectivity, and of not using the best available science for its population and health forecasts.
It says that bills run by lawmakers and wolf management plans put together by various state agencies in the West signal objectives to greatly reduce and limit their wolf populations, including Montana, and that the Fish and Wildlife Service wrongly forecasted that those plans could not be further changed by politicians.
“Gray wolf conservation – or, alternatively, gray wolf eradication – is no longer just a concern of biologists, environmentalists, and ranchers, but rather has grown to embody an outsize but fundamental political conflict roiling the country, especially since 2021,” the letter says. “The FWS has utterly failed to properly account for these sociopolitical aspects, especially those happening in the past three years, in its Species Status Assessment. And politics has been shown to predict public attitudes towards gray wolves and their management.”
The notice also accuses legislators, including Montana’s, of co-opting management decisions from regulatory agencies like Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and says the Fish and Wildlife Service has failed to account for what the groups call “further radicalization” of those lawmakers against wolves.
The notice also cites the Wyoming incident, an example “of wanton and egregious cruelty not seen for decades,” as well as other poaching reports from across several states to say that people opposed to wolves, or who are targeting their fur, are increasingly targeting the animals, and that there is evidence that many illegal wolf killings go entirely unreported.
“It is at best unlikely that legalizing killing decreases poaching, and at worst, liberalized legal killing leads to an increase in unlawful take too,” the notice of intent to sue says.
The group, like others, also plans to challenge the wolf population estimation methodologies used in Idaho and Montana — they use space-to-event models and integrated patch occupancy models — which they say are deficient when it comes to estimating populations and means the Fish and Wildlife Service did not use the best available science in making its decision.
The groups also say that the Fish and Wildlife analysis failed to look into the danger of extinction wolves face in their historical range where they might not currently exist but where suitable habitat remains, as well as in places that only have small but growing populations.
“With its latest Finding, the FWS is repeating many of the same mistakes it has made in its many prior attempts to delist the gray wolf from ESA protection and the action is likely to face the same outcome as these earlier efforts,” Chupka Schultz wrote in the notice of intent to sue.
The groups hope the suit will force the Fish and Wildlife Service to vacate its decision; they will have to wait 60 days before they can file suit.
