Western wolves have made a comeback — now Western states want to kill them

Andrea Zaccardi had just moved to Idaho Falls, a city of roughly 70,000 people not far from Yellowstone National Park, when she was startled by the shadowy creature that darted in front of her. This was roughly a decade ago and Zaccardi was up early in the morning to drive to her new job. Suddenly a "black figure" ran in front of her car, "so quick it was just a flash," she said. Zaccardi stopped the car, looked to her left and saw it: A large, majestic gray wolf, staring at her from the top of a nearby hill.

Today, Zaccardi is carnivore conservation legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on protecting endangered species. So part of her job is to protect the Mountain West's population of wild wolves, like the one who caught her by surprise more than a decade ago. That task has become increasingly complicated: Earlier this month, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service denied a listing petition from a coalition of wildlife conservation groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity) that sought to expand the Endangered Species Act to protect northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves. According to a press statement by Kristine Akland, northern Rockies program director at the CBD, the decision amounted to "turning a blind eye to the cruel, aggressive wolf-killing laws in Montana and Idaho." Officials at the Fish & Wildlife Service, a federal agency under the Department of the Interior, declined to respond.

The coalition's next move, according to Zaccardi, is to sue the FWS in federal court unless the agency remedies what the CBD calls its "legal violations" in failing to protect wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains. 

"The main players in the way of relisting are the states," Zaccardi said, primarily referring to the Republican-dominated state governments of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. "They are very aggressive in terms of wanting to manage their own wildlife, and that doesn't only apply to wolves. We're seeing the same path right now for grizzly bears as well."

Those state governments, like those of many other Western states, tend to be hostile to what they consider excessive federal oversight, and are also strongly aligned with hunters, trappers and especially ranchers, who all have their own reasons for allowing unrestricted hunting of wolves. Those interest groups and their allies in state government have pressured FWS to deny wolves protections from the Endangered Species Act, while conservation groups have accused FWS officials of following bad science and relying on overly generous estimates of local wolf populations. 

Many of the groups in favor of delisting wolves rely on negative stereotypes about these impressive native canids rather than actual data, Zaccardi told Salon. "The livestock industry, of course, doesn't like wolves on the landscape because they sometimes prey on livestock that's using public lands at a extremely subsidized rate," she said. "That impact is blown out of proportion in the news — way less than one percent of livestock are actually killed by wolves." But the facts don't much matter, she continued; the livestock industry is "does not want federal protection of wolves because it limits their ability to go to the states and ask them to kill wolves that are anywhere near their livestock."

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Would-be wolf-hunters do not lack opportunities. Current laws in Idaho allow year-round hunting of wolves without limits and even permits private contractors to kill wolves. In Wyoming, wolves have been labeled as a predatory species and can be killed by anyone, with or without a hunting license. This marks a major change from the 1970s, when wolves were near extermination in the Mountain West and perceived by the public with great sympathy, contributing to the 1978 decision to include wolf species in the Endangered Species Act.

This was a success story of sorts, in the sense that by 2011, the wolf population had recovered enough that public sentiment in Western states had shifted, and Congress took Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves off the list. In 2021, during the final weeks of Donald Trump's administration, all gray wolves in the lower 48 states were stripped of protection under Endangered Species Act protections. That decision was later reversed and is currently under appeal by the FWS. Until then, however, humans who want to kill northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves can easily find ways to do so legally. (According to FWS and conservation groups, there are roughly 2,800 wolves in the Northern Rockies and 4,500 in the Great Lakes region, with much smaller populations in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and rural North Carolina.) 

The CBD also recently announced that it had joined more than 30 other wildlife conservation groups in protesting the state of Idaho's decision to pay private contractors to shot wolves from aircraft, apparently at the behest of ranching interests. The conservationist groups' petition argues that "gunning down wolves from helicopters risks harm to other wildlife like grizzly bears and Canada lynx, as well as public safety and wilderness values." 

But CBD's primary goal, Zaccardi said, is to ensure that Western wolves are relisted under the Endangered Species Act, because "the states can't be trusted to manage them. They're just trying to wipe them out in every possible way." She expects CBD's lawsuit, filed with co-petitioners the Humane Society and the Sierra Club, to reach court within 60 days.

There are probably places that Zaccardi and her fellow conservationists would rather be. One of them is out with the wolves themselves, who as Zaccardi reminded Salon are quite fascinating characters.

Along with her sighting in Idaho Falls, Zaccardi says she has seen groups of wild wolves twice inside Yellowstone National Park, which has a large resident population. The first time, she was camping near a "pretty well known" den site. "I got up at 5 in the morning and went out and sat across the street from the den for hours," she recalled. "It was finally 10 a.m. when they had apparently made a kill, so you could hear them howling. Then we watched all of them run through the field to the left of us, across the street and up toward their den. Every single one of them, even though they were spaced probably three to five minutes apart, took the exact same path to the den."