Maps show the current population and potential habitat for Gray wolves in North America
Federal officials are
declaring victory in their four-decade campaign to rescue the gray wolf,
a predator the government once considered a nuisance and tried to
exterminate.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday
proposed removing the animal's remaining protections as an endangered
species across the Lower 48 states. The exception would be in the
Southwest, where the recovery effort for the related Mexican gray wolf
is lagging.
Despite criticism from some scientists and members
of Congress who consider the move premature, agency director Dan Ashe
said the wolf can thrive and even enlarge its territory without
continued federal protection.
"Taking this step fulfills the commitment we've
made to the American people - to set biologically sound recovery goals
and return wolves to state management when those goals have been met and
threats to the species' future have been addressed," Ashe said.
The proposal will be subject to a 90-day public comment period and a final decision made within a year.
Wolves once roamed across most of North America.
But trapping, poisoning and aerial shooting encouraged by federal
bounties left just one small remnant, in northern Minnesota, by the time
they were placed on the protected list in 1974.
By then, attitudes had shifted. Wildlife managers
acknowledged the role predators play in providing balanced ecosystems,
and the then-new Endangered Species Act mandated protections.
More than 6,100 wolves have now spread across
portions of 10 states, primarily in the Northern Rockies and the western
Great Lakes regions. Most are in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Michigan,
Minnesota and Wisconsin. Packs also have formed in portions of
Washington and Oregon, and individual wolves have been spotted in
Colorado, Utah, the Dakotas, California and the Northeast.
But they have yet to return to vast additional
territory that researchers say has suitable habitat and abundant prey,
including parts of the Pacific Northwest, the southern Rocky Mountains,
upstate New York and New England.
Environmental groups say wolves could make their
way to those places - but only if legal protections remain to prevent
them from being shot. Removing them now would put wolves "at serious
risk for ever achieving natural recovery," said Diane Bentivegna of the
National Wolfwatcher Coalition.
Colorado alone has enough space to support up to
1,000 wolves, according to Carlos Carroll of California's Klamath Center
for Conservation Research. He suggested wildlife officials were bowing
to political pressure, exerted by elected officials across the West who
pushed to limit the wolf's range.
"They've tried to devise their political position
first, and then cherry-pick their science to support it," Carroll said
of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Maggie Howell of the Wolf Conservation Center in
South Salem, N.Y., said the Adirondack Mountains and other parts of the
Northeast are "screaming for a predator like the wolf" to thin an
out-of-control deer herd.
Ashe, however, said it's unrealistic to think
wolves can return to all or even most of their former range, even if
scientifically feasible.
"Science is an important part of this decision, but
really the key is the policy question of when is a species recovered,"
he said. "Does the wolf have to occupy all the habitat that is available
to it in order for it to be recovered? Our answer to that question is
no."
The wolf's resurgence has been unpopular among
ranchers and others unhappy about attacks on livestock and popular sport
animals - even as hunters and trappers in the last several years killed
some 1,600 wolves after protections were lifted in Montana, Wyoming,
Idaho, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Government wildlife agents responding to
livestock attacks have killed thousands more in recent decades.
Removing legal protections could ease the hostility
in the West, where many ranchers complained they're helpless to protect
their herds from marauding attackers.
Hunting advocates also have complained as elk herds dwindle in some areas.
"We can't just say, let them go and let the
predators manage the big game. That's not going to work in this day and
age," said David Allen, president of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Yet the former director of the Fish and Wildlife
Service under President Bill Clinton said the agency's proposal "is a
far cry from what we envisioned for gray wolf recovery when we embarked
on this almost 20 years ago."
"It's a low bar for endangered species recovery,"
said Jamie Rappaport Clark, who was with the agency when wolves were
reintroduced in Idaho and Wyoming in the mid-1990s. She now heads the
group Defenders of Wildlife.
David Mech, a leading wolf expert and senior
scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Paul, Minn., said
wolves already occupy about 80 percent of the territory where people are
likely to tolerate them.
The Center for Biological Diversity vowed to challenge the government in court if it takes the animals off the endangered list.
The Humane Society of the United States, which has
filed a lawsuit challenging the removal of protections from Great Lakes
wolves, is reviewing the government's latest proposal, spokesman Kaitlin
Sanderson said.
Ashe said the plan had been reviewed by top
administration officials, including new Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.
But he dismissed any claims of interference and said the work that went
into the plan was exclusively that of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
He said the agency wants to focus future recovery
efforts on a small number of wolves belonging to a subspecies, the
Mexican gray wolf. Those occur in Arizona and New Mexico, where a
protracted and costly reintroduction plan has stumbled in part due to
illegal killings.
The agency is calling for a tenfold increase in the
territory where biologists are working to rebuild that population,
which now numbers 73 animals. Law enforcement efforts to ward off
poaching in the region would be bolstered.
