For Immediate Release

May 23, 2018

Contact:

Roger Dobson, Media Director, Protect The Wolves Pack, (530) 377-3031

Vicki Markus, Laramie Volunteer Staff Member, Protect The Wolves Pack, (816) 830-1119

Patricia Herman, President, Protect The Wolves™, (530) 377-3031

Dr. Tony Povilitis, Wildlife Scientist/Biologist, Campaign for Yellowstone’s Wolves, (520)384-3886

Indigenous Rights Group to Petition Wyoming Game & Fish for Sacred Resource Protection Safety Zone Around National Parks

LARAMIE, Wyo. – A Native American advocacy group, Protect the Wolves Pack, today announced that it will petition the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to establish a 50-kilometer (31-mile) sacred resource protection safety zone around Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks where wolf killing, predator calls, and night time hunting would be entirely prohibited. The group plans to submit its petition this Wednesday, May 24^th, at the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s public meeting in Laramie on wolf hunting regulations.

“We are concerned about reports that Wyoming guides and outfitters are using predator calls to lure wolves out of the national park so their clients can shoot them,” said Roger Dobson of Protect The Wolves Pack, a Cowlitz tribal member from Washington state. “If we don’t protect the wolves as they wander outside national park boundaries, they’re bound to get shot.”

Currently, the State of Wyoming wolf management plan allows trophy hunting of wolves right up to the boundaries of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, and as a result wolf packs that live inside national park boundaries are vulnerable to hunting, trapping, and other causes of death when they wander across the invisible boundaries that separate protected National Park lands from national Forests and other land ownerships where they can be killed.

“Our National Parks are mandated to protect sacred tribal sites as well as sacred resources for the indigenous under National Park policy,” said Vicki Markus, a volunteer for Protect The Wolves Pack who resides in Centennial, Wyoming. “It is time that the trustees begin managing our resources for the public, and not the well-funded special interest trophy hunter and cattle rancher associations.

In Yellowstone, a preponderance of scientific studies show that the reintroduction of wolves has triggered a re-balancing of the natural system, helping shrubs and trees like aspen and cottonwood to recover and thrive, and improving habitat for native wildlife from songbirds to beavers and wolverines.

Protect the Wolves also plans to submit petitions to protect the Yellowstone wolves signed by over 370,000 members of the public at the meeting, that have been gathered by Dr. Tony Povilitis with Campaign for Yellowstone’s Wolves.

“It is disheartening that the vast majority of Americans in fact support wolves, yet are allowed to be controlled tiny group of well-connected and political powerful ranchers who seem to drive anti-wolf policies in the Wyoming state agencies” added Markus.

The petition is the brainchild of Tony Povilitis helping the Native American rights advocates, who view wolves as a sacred resource of great importance to their culture.

“Wolves are a sacred resource to native peoples,” said Dobson. “Wolves are part of the Seven Teachings, teaching us humility and how to function as a family unit.”

The petition has garnered letters of support from the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council, NW Tribal Emergency Management, National Tribal Emergency Management.

“Protect The Wolves™ Pack has spoken with local Tribes in Wyoming and anticipate letters of support coming prior to the June 19^th comment deadline period,” added Dobson. Further he stated that they have also been contacted by the Rocky Mountain Region of the Department of Justice, which has told them that they will help them set up meetings with Wyoming’s Game and Fish upper management regarding indigenous sacred resources.