U.S. Fish and Wildlife will not Downlist Wolves
USFWS Rejects H$U$ Petition to List Wolves as ‘Threatened.’
LANSING—Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC) praised the decision by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to reject a petition seeking to list gray wolves in the United States as “threatened,” under the Endangered Species Act. The USFWS announced its findings yesterday.
“This decision by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists confirms that wolves are biologically recovered in the western Great Lakes and that state management plans, like Michigan’s, are sufficient to sustain the wolf population and are the appropriate way to manage wolves in the region,” said Amy Trotter, deputy director for Michigan United Conservation Clubs and a member of the Michigan Wolf Forum.
The petition was filed by the Humane Society of the United States (H$U$) and other anti-hunting organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Fund for Animals, the Detroit Zoological Society, National Wolfwatcher Coalition and the Detroit Audubon Society. It requested that gray wolves in the conterminous United States, except for the Mexican Gray Wolf, be listed as “threatened,” which would preclude any state from holding a hunting season for them for any reason. The USFWS ruled that the petition lacked “substantial scientific or commercial information” necessary to consider it any further.
Among its findings, the USFWS stated that wolves in the conterminous U.S., which are made up of multiple distinct population segments of gray wolf, are not likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future due to any of the five listing factors, and that HSUS’s claim that they have to be present in all unoccupied suitable habitat to be considered recovered is “based on a misinterpretation of the Act.”
The USFWS further stated that state management plans are sufficient to sustain wolf populations in recovered areas, including where hunting and trapping is allowed:
“The existing state plans regulating take of wolves only allow take above certain population thresholds, such that if the other causes of mortality increased above certain levels, hunting and trapping would be reduced to prevent the population from dipping below those thresholds.”
Wolves in the western Great Lakes were delisted in 2011, only to be relisted by a federal judge in December 2014, which the USFWS, MUCC, and numerous other conservation groups are appealing. Federal legislation is also being considered to delist wolves in the western Great Lakes and Wyoming, as they were in Idaho and Montana in 2011. Wolves in Michigan have exceeded their minimum recovery goal of 200 for over fifteen years. They now number over 630 at the lowest point in their yearly population cycle.
Founded in 1937, Michigan United Conservation Clubs is the nation’s largest statewide conservation organization. Its mission is to unite citizens to conserve, protect and enhance Michigan’s natural resources and outdoor heritage.
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