BOISE, Idaho — Idaho officials are challenging a federal court order to destroy information collected from tracking collars placed on elk and wolves obtained illegally by landing a helicopter in a central Idaho wilderness area.
Idaho Department of Fish and Game Director Virgil Moore on Tuesday requested a stay of the judgment in U.S. District Court in Idaho pending the agency’s appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled in January the U.S. Forest Service broke environmental laws nearly two years ago by authorizing Idaho Fish and Game to put collars on about 60 elk by landing helicopters in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, where engines are prohibited.
Idaho also collared four wolves in an action the Forest Service didn’t authorize. Fish and Game blamed miscommunication with a helicopter crew.
Winmill wrote that it was such an extreme case “the only remedy that will directly address the ongoing harm is an order requiring destruction of the data.”
Specifically, Fish and Game is seeking to stay the court’s order to destroy data and to stay the court’s prohibiting the agency as well as the Forest Service from using that data.
The Idaho Department of Fish and Game “agrees that as a condition of such stay, IDFG would not use any live radio collar placed during the January 2016 helicopter project in the Frank Church Wilderness to locate wolves for lethal removal,” the document states.
Source: Idaho fighting order to destroy wilderness wolf, elk data – The Washington Post
Comments
We need to protect wolves/wildlife before they no longer exist. Why would anyone want to take their life from them & not let them live??? It’s their God given right to live it out. They help our ecosystem, control diseases, etc.
Shirley, I just got a note from Living With Wolves
(the Dutchers, who first cared for a semi-wild wolf pack in Idaho in the early 1990s to prove to USFWS that wolves functioned on the Idaho landscape. That organization is focused on education – creating beautiful photographic and basic informational books from THe Dutchers photography, creating strong online and book/paper class materials they distribute to k- up schools. They have numerous accomplished wolf advocates on their steering board).
They advised me that Idaho’s attempt last spring to allow hunters and trappers to Bait in order to execute wolves, was defeated by citizens speaking in public meetings, writing against the practice, and alerting other pro-wolf and wildlife organizations.
If you are at all involved with early education, including just having a child in school, you can access this important material and get it into schools – that way YOU will change the culture.
We need more generosity in human outlook, and that organization has been highly important in beginning the change.
NEVER feel powerless! I know how devastating it can be to those who know animals. I have seen the death of wolves, coyotes, and others, knowing tat the individuals who died were highly important – just as you recognize your own family as vitally important.
But action – just whenever you feel most heartbroken, is the way to end the killing, and restore our vital and ancient relationship with ALL the other lives at this moment on the Earth.
THe stay was granted because Idaho Fish & Game broke the law.
Any information they do gain from any recording equipment remaining inn te Frank Church will indirectly be used to increase Idaho’s murder of wolves outside the area.
Not so very long ago, one could pretty much go from the Wood River (north on 75 out of Sun Valley) over Galena pass into the Sawtooth Valley, and past Stanley down the Snake, sometimes seeing or easily being able to find evidence of wolves. The corrupt delisting and surrendering of wolf lives to murderous psychopathic “hunters” gunned all the packs using the valley between te Boulder, White Cloud, and the Sawtooths (that area is National Recreation Area, so, packtrains of butchers on horseback can go after any who are not extremely secretive). as a result of cattle & sheepherding interests makes every road in Idaho a deadly place like the famous Korean DMZ or the West-East German border.
After the open season (it has varied between 10 months and even 12 in Idaho over several years), one traveling any road between US Federal Your Public Lands, would contain numerous toy warfare “hunters’ Glassing and scoping for wolves – even out of season.
So the Frank was a place where none of those greaseballs could walk deeply enough to find safe wolves.
We need some serious change in the human arrogation of lethal control of the world.
TO me, all the negotiation, all the compromise, all the arrogation should not exist.
The closest determination of rights of wild, self-willed lives in nature, was placed in Title 2 of the Ecuadorian Constitution, which still enshrined the rights of humans above the rights of other native citizens – wildlife.
But the best parts here:
Chapter 7
: Rights for Nature
“Article 71. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution
Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.
The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect toward
all the elements that form an ecosystem
.
Article 72. Nature has the right to restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems. In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.
Article 73. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles. .The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited. ”
(it’s difficult to structure comments in the best readable way – I can’t edit it properly for clarity, but you can see that if Ecuador’s Constitutional rights for people (natural and juridical – that is humans and institutions and businesses incorporated as “persons” , still have greater rights, these articles have less meaning)
so what is necessary is a clear, unbiased equality, difficult to achieve in a world overpopulated with humans scheming for their toy money and personal or group advantage through exploitation.
But it is the world’s first start or more accurately, return, to creating a council such as the Oneida, wherein ever since the recognition that other lives have equal validity (read modern versions of the “Who Speaks For Wolf” tale by which those people learned to live more inclusively).
I wish I could make short meaningful comments, but I long ago tired of short meaningless comments posted by humans that merely stir up their propensity to fight and kill to get their way.
Some Idaho residents work hard to speak for wolves (google that and then go take part in West Yellowstone next July at that meeting), and others – Predator Defense, the Nez Perce Tribe, Living With Wolves, Friends of the Clearwater, and others exist.
The Wood River Wolf Project has proven that the sheepherders and wolves CAN coexist, but my point of view is that any humans who refuse, are the problem, and are in severe need of complete management to remove their lethality and influence on any governance or public lands.