SCI In Center Of Western Wolves Fight
The fight over the status of Western wolves continues after a district judge in Montana ruled last month that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service erred in denying petitions to put wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming back under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
SCI, together with the Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, appealed the court’s decision. SCI’s advocacy team believes there are good grounds for the appeal and looks forward to making their case in the Ninth Circuit Court.
In this latest ruling, the judge determined that the Service’s most recent conclusion that gray wolves in the Western U.S. no longer qualify as a threatened or endangered species under the ESA was “erroneous.”
His decision opens the way to relist these wolves under the ESA. While disappointing, the decision was not surprising as this judge has a history of overturning federal wolf and grizzly bear rules.
“SCI is frustrated that the court ignored the reality of successful wolf conservation in the Western U.S. and instead ruled in favor of the plaintiffs’ arguments that are clearly biased against state wildlife management and counter to the law and the science,” said SCI CEO W. Laird Hamberlin. “SCI has appealed this mistaken ruling and will defend legal, regulated hunting as part of science-driven state wildlife management programs for wolf species.”
Several anti-hunting organizations had petitioned the Service to reinstate ESA protections for wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains states due to changes in state law that seek to increase the harvest of wolves and reduce wolf populations.
Contrary to the plaintiffs’ assertions, these states have been managing wolf populations in the thousands, many times the delisting threshold of 300 wolves across Idaho and Montana. SCI and partners defended the Service’s decision that these healthy wolf populations are not endangered or threatened.
While this decision leaves the current ESA listing for wolves in place for the time being, the Service must reconsider whether wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains should again be listed under the ESA. This decision represents another example of biased judges creating roadblocks for sound, science-backed conservation policy.
The Service has sought to remove wolves from the ESA lists for decades. In 2009, the Service published a science-based decision to remove wolves from the ESA lists in the Northern Rocky Mountains (which covers the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the eastern third of Oregon and Washington, and a small corner of Utah). This same district court invalidated that decision. This came as little surprise as environmental, anti-hunting activist groups have challenged not only each delisting decision by the Service, but also Congressional action in 2011 that mandated Northern Rocky Mountain wolves be removed from ESA lists.
SCI has been part of every lawsuit, but despite having science and law on our side, activist courts have consistently overturned the Service’s findings, arrogantly substituting their judgment for that of the Service and Congress.
In the meantime, wolf populations have exploded in number and expanded in range throughout the Northern Rocky Mountains. Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming together conserve more than 2,600 wolves, many times the wolf recovery threshold of 300 wolves established by the Service in 2009.
SCI maintains one of the longest-running legal programs to defend hunting rights, and its newly formed SCI Center for Conservation Law and Education, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, unites SCI’s in-house legal counsel, state liaisons, and the Hunters’ Embassy on Capitol Hill to bolster SCI’s mission.
More information on the Center is available at ccle.safariclub.org