Michigan wolf management is now in the hands of a Washington D.C. federal district court judge. At issue is whether wolf populations have fully recovered. On one side of the matter is the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), which claims that the gray wolf still needs protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA); on the other side is the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation (USSAF) and others such as Michigan United Conservation Clubs defending the 2011 delisting rule against the HSUS lawsuit.
The decision may well determine whether the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has the authority to delist recovered populations of a species, and return that recovered population to state management, while continuing to manage populations of the same species in different locales under the ESA.
“Wolf populations are just at the threshold of rebounding in many areas across the Great Lakes Region,” said Linda Hatfield, executive director of Help Our Wolves Live, one of the plaintiffs in the suit. “The recent delisting has taken the wolf back to the old days, days before the ESA, the days of state-sponsored bounty payments to hunters and trappers that were intended to eliminate wolves from the landscape.” What HSUS seems to be saying is that if wolf populations have not fully recovered everywhere, then they shouldn’t be hunted anywhere.
Jonathan Lovvorn, senior vice president and chief counsel for animal protection litigation at The HSUS states its position this way: “This decision rolls back the only line of defense for wolf populations, and paves the way for the same state-sponsored eradication policies that pushed this species to the brink of extinction in the first place.”
This type of hyperbole simply doesn’t stack up to the facts when one considers that Michigan has concluded its first wolf hunt after setting a quota of 43 animals based on a population of between 600-700 wolves. In fact, only 23 wolves were killed.
Because there is no dispute that the wolf populations in the Great Lakes states have met and exceeded all recovery goals, HSUS has advanced baseless legal theories that, if accepted, would make it extremely difficult to ever take any species off the lists of endangered or threatened species. HSUS is not arguing that wolves in the Great Lakes are scarce. Instead, it is primarily arguing that wolves in the Great Lakes must remain on the list of endangered species unless and until wolves become common everywhere else in the country.
Over the past 10 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has issued “delisting rules” regarding wolves on three occasions (2007, 2009, and 2011). These actions clearly indicate that wolf populations have recovered in the Great Lakes States to the point where they should be removed from the list of endangered and threatened species, and management control returned to the state’s wildlife agencies.
It’s really not complicated at all, unless of course, one wants it to be.
