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Over the past decades, many of us have received what seemed to be interminable pleas from environmental groups to support the gray wolf.  Suddenly, especially for those who weren’t closely following the saga of the feds’ listing and delisting of the wolf as an endangered species, the chicken has come home to roost. What many environmentalists feared and many hunters/trappers pined for is here: wolf management, by and large, has been returned to the states.
Before 1500 and the European spread, it is estimated that two million wolves existed across North America. By 1978, the gray wolf was listed as a federally endangered species. In 1995, the year the Clinton administration reintroduced them into Yellowstone National Park, wolves were practically extinct in the lower 48 states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service now estimates around 6,100 wolves in the contiguous U.S.
Minnesota is the sole state that held onto its indigenous wolf population, despite bounties for dead wolves being paid through the 1960s. In 1998, a MN Wolf Management Roundtable was convened, bringing together representatives from the environmental movement, agriculture, hunting, trapping, wolf advocate organizations, and government agencies, as well as private citizens. A consensus package of wolf management recommendations was reached by this diverse group. The package included population monitoring, depredation management, livestock compensation, and public education. Population management measures, including public taking, were to be considered no sooner than after a future five-year, post-delisting monitoring period to be performed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But times have changed. In 2009, President-elect Obama let stand a last-minute announcement made by the Department of the Interior under President George W. Bush: the gray wolf would be removed from the endangered species list in the upper Midwest, Idaho, and Montana. Prior to this, environmental groups had successfully sued to keep the wolf on the list.
Obama did restore the practice requiring all agencies to consult expert biologists about potential effects on both endangered plants and wildlife. But anti-wolf advocates made an end run. In 2011, Western lawmakers attached a rider to federal budget legislation, one that mandated lifting protections for 1,300 wolves in the Northern Rockies. The rider, introduced by Montana senator Jon Tester – D and Idaho representative Mike Simpson – R, was an amendment to the must-pass appropriations bill. Its language barred courtroom challenges. This was the first time in history that Congress itself had removed an animal that was listed under the Endangered Species Act.
Again, as throughout years of contention, conservation organizations prevailed on the public for support, this time for a case against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups questioned whether Congress had the right to change law and thereby delist wolves. These groups lost.
U.S. District Court judge Donald Molloy was conflicted. He held that the rider was unconstitutional because it violated separation of powers, but felt constrained by higher court precedent. Molloy wrote, “The way in which Congress acted in trying to achieve a debatable policy change by attaching a rider... is a tearing away, an undermining and a disrespect for the fundamental idea of the rule of law.” The case had moved the wolf debate to a test of one of the highest principles in U.S. government, one that Molloy himself acknowledged as a path of appeal.
But Idaho immediately authorized a same-year hunting and trapping season with no limits, while Montana did likewise, setting a limit of 200. In late 2011 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the gray wolf in the Upper Midwest, stating that the species, with 4,400 wolves in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, was no longer considered endangered, and that the population had exceeded the minimum recovery goals of 300 for three consecutive years.
Conservationists opposed federal delisting because it meant that wolf management would be left to each state within its own boundaries and that the wolf’s slow, tenuous recovery would be jeopardized. Their fears were fulfilled, with Minnesota and Wisconsin immediately preparing for hunting and trapping seasons, as did Idaho and Montana.
Both the Minnesota legislature and the Department of Natural Resources jumped the gun. In 2011, prior to federal delisting, a special Minnesota legislative session was held, reclassifying the gray wolf as small game and eliminating the five-year waiting period for a hunt, which was to have followed delisting. Then the DNR expedited hunt rule-making and eliminated public comment, even though such comment was still the law. In May 2012, a wolf hunt was included in an omnibus Fish and Game bill, establishing hunting, trapping and snaring in Minnesota. During the first Minnesota hunting and trapping season in the fall of 2012, 413 wolves were killed.
Polls indicate that most in the Upper Midwest would leave the wolf population to manage itself. 79 percent of Minnesotans view wolves as an asset and many as a persecuted species.
Hunters, trappers and livestock farmers are more likely to side with a hunt, and though only about 12 percent of the population, they appear to have large sway. Hunters regard killing wolves as a sport; trappers can sell the pelts, which often go to China for substantial prices. Farmers occasionally lose livestock, but state and federal law provides them with compensation, as do some conservation groups.
Some Anishinaabeg believe there’s another reason that hunters want to kill wolves. According to tribal elders, in the beginning, the wolf and the Anishinaabeg walked together as brothers. Wolves care for their pack as people care for their families, looking out for one another and mutually raising their young. When a pack member is lost, the livelihood of the rest is in jeopardy.
Bad River Band member Sylvia Cloud sees a relationship between the extermination of the buffalo and the killing of wolves. “Anything that is sacred to our people, they violate it,” she said. “To put people into mourning is why they’re doing this, to show their control with laws. To gain control of the people, you put them down.”
The majority of the public does not hunt, trap, snare, or farm, and would just as well allow the wolf to inhabit its natural environment without being pursued and decimated year after year. Since the 2011 delisting of the gray wolf and the subsequent establishment of the wolf hunt by all delisted states, individuals and groups have risen anew in the Upper Midwest in support of the wolf.