Today, The HSUS and 21 other organizations – from the Detroit Zoo to the Center for Biological Diversity and the Wisconsin Federated Humane Societies to the Sault Sainte Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians – petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to downlist wolves from “endangered” to “threatened” status across most of their range in the lower 48 states. We took this action, along with so many other wolf-protection organizations, to maintain critical federal protections for the fragmented populations numbering just 5,000 or so wolves in the coterminous United States, and to give federal and state wildlife agencies more latitude to manage the occasional rare conflicts between wolves and people.
This action comes in the wake of two recent federal court rulings, in litigation brought by The HSUS and other groups, that restored federal protections for wolves in the Great Lakes region and in Wyoming – a very significant portion of their current range in the United States. In response to these court rulings – which rebuked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its piecemeal delisting of wolf populations in select portions of their range – anti-wolf politicians are beating the drums for Congress to intervene and delist wolves entirely, subverting the core principles of the Endangered Species Act and substituting a purely political decision for one that balances the diverse views of stakeholders with biological, economic, and social concerns.