The U.S. Interior Department on Thursday said it will publish its plan to remove federal protections for wolves in the Federal Register on Friday, giving the public until mid-May to comment on the proposal.
The plan, first promised last June and announced again last week, would have the most impact on Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan where established populations of wolves currently exist but where a court order has retained Endangered Species Act Protections for them.
The federal plan, developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in recent months, would “delist” wolves across all the contiguous U.S., even where they do not exist, although acts of Congress already removed federal protections for Rocky Mountain and other western wolves.
Comments on the plan must be made within 60 days of publication - by May 14. Information on the plan, called a federal rule, along with instructions on how to comment, can be found at www.fws.gov/home/wolfrecovery/ .
It will be the fourth straight administration to pursue a formal wolf delisting, with each effort so far thwarted by wolf protection groups and federal courts that deemed the previous efforts improper on unwarranted.
ADVERTISEMENT
Livestock farmers and some hunting groups support ending federal protections for wolves, saying the animals have become too numerous and their numbers need to be culled to reduce wolf-human conflicts.
Wolf supporters say that, while the animals are indeed thriving in the upper Great Lakes region, state agencies moved too fast to kill too many wolves once federal protections were withdrawn in 2012. Critics also note that wolves have not recovered across a broad portion of their original range, as the federal Endangered Species Act appears to call for.
The Fish & Wildlife Service, part of the U.S. Interior Department, has tried multiple times - through the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations - to delist wolves in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, saying the big predators have fully recovered here after brushing with extinction in the 1960s and 1970s.
Wolves in the U.S. outside Alaska first received endangered species protections in 1975 when fewer than 1,000 remained - all of them in Northeastern Minnesota - after centuries of unregulated hunting, trapping and poisoning. Now, there are more than 5,000, mostly in the upper Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountain west.
The most recent of those delisting efforts, in 2012, allowed state agencies to hold wolf trapping and hunting seasons for three years until late 2014 when a federal judge ruled that the agency had erred in taking wolves off the endangered list too soon. That decision was upheld in 2017 by a federal appeals court decision, keeping wolves protected across the region to this point.
But the Trump administration said it will take its turn at developing a broader wolf proposal that will hold up in court.
“The facts are clear and indisputable - the gray wolf no longer meets the definition of a threatened or endangered species. Today the wolf is thriving on its vast range and it is reasonable to conclude it will continue to do so in the future,” said David Bernhardt, acting U.S. Secretary of the Interior, in a statement Thursday. “Today’s action puts us one step closer to transitioning the extraordinary effort that we have invested in gray wolf recovery to other species who actually need the protections of the Endangered Species Act, leaving the states to carry on the legacy of wolf conservation.”
The proposal would not impact Mexican gray wolves, which are listed separately under the Endangered Species Act.
ADVERTISEMENT
The renewed federal agency plan comes as efforts to pass legislation delisting wolves has repeatedly stalled and failed to pass in Congress. Recent efforts to include wolf delisting in spending bills have failed and standalone wolf bills also have stalled without final action.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources estimates about 2,850 wolves in the state, by far the most of any outside Alaska. The Wisconsin DNR estimates just under 1,000 with more than 500 estimated in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
