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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Wolf ruling

The science supports de-listing; the law should, too

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Residents of northern Minnesota are understandably upset over a federal district court judge’s decision to overturn the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to delist the gray wolf in the western Great Lakes region.

The decision essentially terminates wolf hunting seasons in three states, including Minnesota, at least until an appeal can be heard and decided, a process that could take up to two years.

There is little question but that the status of the gray wolf population in Minnesota is strong, and that the limited hunting and trapping of wolves now allowed in Minnesota is easily sustainable. Every wolf expert assembled by the International Wolf Center on a recent conference call with reporters concurred that the wolf population in the western Great Lakes is doing fine.

Unfortunately, that was never really at issue in the case heard in a Washington, D.C., courtroom late last year. Instead, the plaintiffs focused on the legal process under which the USFWS delisted the wolf in the western Great Lakes, and highlighted what could well be a technical violation of the Endangered Species Act committed by the USFWS.

While the judge has been criticized for her decision, it’s fair to point out that the USFWS’s decade-long effort to delist the gray wolf has been plagued by court setbacks time and again. This isn’t a case of one overreaching judge— the real problem appears to be that the USFWS failed to follow the process set up for delisting early on— and those initial missteps keep coming back to haunt them in court case after court case.

That’s troublesome, because it puts the Endangered Species Act — a critical law that has been instrumental in saving many species of wildlife from extinction in the U.S.— in an unfavorable light. When experts agree that a species is “recovered,” within a region, the process for delisting should not be as complicated as we have seen with the wolf. By highlighting technical violations in the delisting, wolf advocates could, in the long run, be doing more harm than good for their cause. Congress has already intervened in the wolf issue once before, simply enacting a new law declaring the wolf “recovered” in the northern Rockies. Wildlife advocates, and the animals they seek to protect, benefit when management decisions are based on science, rather than politics.

In this case, the science strongly supports delisting the wolf in the western Great Lakes, particularly in Minnesota. And ultimately, it’s the science that should prevail.

By using the courts to stymie the scientific consensus, over relatively minor procedural missteps, wolf advocates are undermining public support for the Endangered Species Act—which won’t serve their cause in the long run. The Endangered Species Act has plenty of detractors, who will highlight this exact case to argue for weakening the act. Perhaps it’s time for wildlife advocates to think less about winning technical battles in court, and focus their energies on the far more important political war over the future of this critical, and potentially endangered, federal law.