Wildlife and People

The Wyoming Wolf Blues

Wyoming is an independent-minded state. Their state legislature decided early on that wolves are dangerous predators that kill livestock, and therefore wolf populations must be controlled.

Wyoming’s independent frame of mind sets the animal rights people all a-quiver. After all, wolves have rights but livestock, deer, and elk have none. So at the whining behest of animal righters Canadian wolves must be and were dumped into Wyoming by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, without Congressional direction but in full obeisance to extremist liberal wolf-lover urban lobbyist groups, in order to correct Wyoming for her intransigence in thinking that wolves have no more rights than a sheep or a rattlesnake.

So Wyoming got the Canadian wolves but decided to manage them like any other wildlife. Oh but no said the overweening Federal Government. The Canadian wolves are “endangered” even though they are exotic and the Federal Government dumped them there in the first place on a lark and without any legal mandate to do so.

Up yours said Wyoming, we will control wolves and shoot them if they start killing our livestock.

And the wolves did exactly that, and Wyoming established a “trophy hunt” and a predator control program for Canadian wolves.

Well now, the extremist liberal wolf-lover urban lobbyist groups had a tizzy fit and sued, sued, sued. The Federal Government, in the person of His Honor Federal District Judge Donald Molloy said you can’t do that, Wyoming. We in the Black-Robed Federal Judiciary are aghast and distraught about that. We will cut your Federal wildlife funding, money which by the way was stolen by the Feds from Wyoming in the first place.

So Judge Molloy got all puffed up and declared exotic Canadian wolves to be an official “endangered species” no matter what and that Canadian wolves must be allowed to breed like junkyard dogs until there is a continuous blanket of Canadian wolves in the USA from sea to shining sea. Then the extremist liberal wolf-lover urban lobbyist groups got all teary eyed and thanked the puffy Judge for his barking insanity.

Meanwhile Wyoming said stick it in your pipe and smoke it Judgy-wudgy, fired their wolf specialists, and kept their trophy hunt and predator control program. The state wolf specialists were actually paid by the USFWS, by the way, so those poor saps are still getting paid because the USFWS has no other options and couldn’t fire their own grandmother if she robbed from till.

Now the USFWS is going to “delist” the Canadian wolves, again, or try to, despite puffy Judgy-Wudgy and the extremist liberal wolf-lover urban lobbyist groups, because they (the USFWS) feel guilty for jerking Wyoming around by dumping Canadian wolves there illegally in the first place and causing everybody grief. No kidding. The USFWS is finally getting sick of causing everybody so much grief and being roundly despised and ridiculed for being little more than braindead sheep themselves and being led by the nose by pusillanimous extremist liberal wolf-lover urban lobbyist groups.

Or something like that.

A more sedate but less colorful and frankly less frank review of wolf politics in Wyoming was published in the Jackson Hole Star Tribune Sunday [here]. But you need not read between the lines unless you want to because I laid it out for you in plain English above.

Wyoming to disband wolf team

By CHRIS MERRILL, Star-Tribune, Nov 16, 2008

LANDER — Wyoming’s four-man wolf management team is expected to be officially disbanded Monday — fallout from the federal decision to put wolves back on the endangered species list.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is recommending to the Game and Fish Commission that it re-assign two of the department’s remaining three wolf specialists, an agency spokesman said.

The Game and Fish Commission will meet Monday and Tuesday in Jackson, and its members will likely decide Monday afternoon whether to enact this recommendation, said Eric Keszler, spokesman for the Game and Fish Department.

Mike Jimenez, who was briefly the coordinator of the state’s wolf management program, is no longer with the Game and Fish Department, he told the Star-Tribune recently.

Because wolves are once again protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, Jimenez has returned solely to his role with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as the wolf recovery project leader for the state of Wyoming.

When Jimenez, based in Jackson, was with the Game and Fish Department, he had three wolf specialists working under him, one each based in Cody, Pinedale and Lander. …

“When we got the general fund money for those positions, we anticipated wolves would be delisted and the department would be managing wolves throughout the trophy game area,” Keszler said. “Obviously now all that’s changed, so we don’t need all four of those positions.”

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is still responsible for investigating livestock losses to wolves within the state’s wolf trophy game area, in the northwest corner of the state, so department officials are recommending that the commission retain one of the wolf specialists to perform the investigations, Keszler said.

By state law, the Game and Fish Department must reimburse livestock producers for confirmed losses to wolves inside the trophy game zone, and that hasn’t changed with their federal relisting. But state lawmakers could get rid of that provision during the 2009 legislative session. …

The Bush administration removed wolves in this part of the country from protection under the Endangered Species Act in March, handing over management to Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. That decision was challenged as soon as legally possible in federal court by a dozen conservation and animal rights organizations.

In July, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in Montana sided with the conservation organizations and issued an injunction against the rule, saying the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to ensure genetic exchange between the three main wolf populations in the three states, and had flip-flopped on Wyoming’s “dual status” plan, by first rejecting it and then accepting it, without justification for the change.

That decision in July effectively restored federal endangered species status to wolves until a decision in the larger legal challenge was handed down.

In October, at the request of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the judge “vacated” the delisting rule, essentially making it void.

The Game and Fish Department has since revised its wolf management plan to clarify its commitment to maintain at least 15 breeding pairs of the canines and 150 individual wolves in the state, and added new language that further restricts Wyoming’s ability to change the trophy game boundary.

The agency took public comment on its revised rules until Monday, and will be presenting the rule changes to the Game and Fish Commission on Tuesday.

By revising its management plan, Wyoming is trying to address some of Judge Molloy’s concerns and avoid being left out of a new attempt by the federal government to once again remove wolves in the Northern Rockies from the endangered species list.

All three states created trophy game zones for wolves, but Wyoming was the only one to establish a “predator” area for the animals where they could be shot on sight by anybody, without limits.

Wyoming’s predator management area for wolves was one of the items of concern cited by Judge Molloy in his injunction ruling.

The classification of wolves as trophy game in the northwest corner and predators everywhere else is written into state law. Although there has been talk amongst some lawmakers of possibly designating wolves as trophy game animals statewide, such a change could only be done by the state Legislature, which doesn’t meet until January.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting public comment on its new proposal to delist wolves through Nov. 28. The agency is considering delisting the animals in Idaho and Montana only, and leaving them designated as endangered in Wyoming.