Wolves no longer protected in northern Rockies

How many times will we have to be at this point? Before you go on to read this story, be prepared for an interesting phrase- seemingly passed off like everyone just knew it was happening- wolves were once killed en masse by "government sponsored poisoning."

Government sponsored poisoning? Has dishonor sunk to new lows? What we poison out there, we poison in here, because in this web of living force, "outside" and "inside" are not absolute distinctions. They are poisoning more than animals, more than wolves; they are poisoning our right to exist in this world.

It grieves me to think that president Obama has decided to go forward with this, upholding a policy instituted by former president Bush; being an independent, I don't get involved in democrat/republican politics that much, but I was happier to see Obama in office than McCain, personally. However, I didn't have any hopes one way or the other; Obama, like all presidents, will have to prove himself. His "start" appears to be good- he certainly has a lot on his plate, (perhaps too much to care about wolves) but like with so many things in life, the true spirit is in the details- the trees that we can miss when focusing on the forest. And he, along with all government officials, has a sacred duty to care and to do better than this.

A good leader isn't just a leader on a macro level; they must love every grain of soil and every beast or bird that flies through their land. I am fully convinced personally that such a man or woman could not fail to be a good leader, because if they can care about something as "insignificant" (from most people's perspective) as wolf populations or Spotted Owls, they would have to have a care for people. It has to do with caring for the whole- not just the parts we single out for special treatment.

There is no such thing as "just" animals; there is only the immense sacred mystery that appears as both people and animals, and which demands from human beings a moral way of living that stems from the deepest places. And that moral way, for me, is demonstrated in how we treat every part of every thing.


Wolves no longer protected in northern Rockies
By MATTHEW BROWN, Associated Press Writer
Mon May 4, 8:46 am ET

BILLINGS, Mont. – Wolves in parts of the northern Rockies and the Great Lakes region come off the endangered species list on Monday, opening them to public hunts in some states for the first time in decades.

Federal officials say the population of gray wolves in those areas has recovered and is large enough to survive on its own. The animals were listed as endangered in 1974, after they had been wiped out across the lower 48 states by hunting and government-sponsored poisoning.

"We've exceeded our recovery goals for nine consecutive years, and we fully expect those trends will continue," said Seth Willey, regional recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver.

With the delisting, state wildlife agencies will have full control over the animals. States such as Idaho and Montana plan to resume hunting the animals this fall, but no hunting has been proposed in the Great Lakes region.

Ranchers and livestock groups, particularly in the Rockies, have pushed to strip the endangered status in hopes that hunting will keep the population in check.

About 300 wolves in Wyoming will remain on the list because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected the state's plan for a "predator zone" where wolves could be shot on sight. Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal and a coalition of livestock and hunting groups have announced a lawsuit against the federal government over the decision.

Freudenthal, a Democrat, claimed "political expediency" was behind the rejection of his state's wolf plan.

Wolves were taken off the endangered list in the northern Rockies — including Wyoming — for about five months last year. After environmentalists sued, a federal judge in Montana restored the protections and cited Wyoming's predator zone as a main reason. In the Great Lakes, the animal was off the list beginning in 2007 until a judge in Washington last September ordered them protected again.

Environmental and animal rights groups have also said they planned to sue over the delisting, claiming that there are still not enough wolves to guarantee their survival. The groups point to Idaho's plan to kill up to 100 wolves believed to have killed elk.

"We understand that hunting is part of wildlife policy in the West," said Anne Carlson with the Western Wolf Coalition. "(But) wolves should be managed like native wildlife and not as pests to be exterminated."

The delisting review began under the administration of President George W. Bush and the proposal was upheld by President Barack Obama's administration after an internal review. In a recent letter to several members of Congress, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wrote that he was "confident that science justifies the delisting of the gray wolf."

Willey said his agency projected there would be between 973 and 1302 wolves in the northern Rockies under state management, a number well above the 300 wolves set as the original benchmark for the animal's recovery.

More than 1,300 wolves roam the mountains of Montana and Idaho and an estimated 4,000 live in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

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May the wolf-father protect his people.

The Still-in-Danger Gray Wolf

Published: January 28, 2008
This editorial was found here from the New York Times.

* * *

One of the great wildlife management stories of our time is the reintroduction of the gray wolf to the Rocky Mountains. From a few dozen animals released in Yellowstone in 1995, the wolf population has grown to about 1,500 in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. This remarkable comeback means that later this year the gray wolf will be removed from the list of endangered species, at which point its fate will be entrusted to federally approved state management plans that conservationists warn are unacceptably weak.

Yet the wolves could find themselves in trouble even before they are removed from the endangered list. At the same time it was negotiating the state management plans, the Bush administration was quietly revising an important rule in the Endangered Species Act. The purpose of the rule is to give states flexibility in managing reintroduced species. As revised by the administration, it would require only that each state protect 20 breeding pairs and 200 total wolves. That could allow as many as 900 recently protected wolves to be slaughtered.

The revised rule is aimed not at protecting cattle or sheep but at protecting elk and deer for hunters. In our view, hunters would be wise to oppose this. The question for them is whether they want to hunt in what passes for nature, complete with a predator like the wolf, or in what passes for a game farm.

Since the gray wolf was reintroduced, studies have shown its importance to the balance of nature. What matters isn’t just the presence of wolves in the landscape, though that is profound in itself, as anyone who has seen a wolf pack crossing Yellowstone can attest. What matters is the effect they have on their ecosystem: suppressing coyotes, changing the behavior of elk and benefiting grizzly bears, which routinely take over the kills wolves make. The wolf has had to wait eons for humans to become wise enough to coexist with it. That can’t happen until this cynical loophole in the Endangered Species Act is closed.

Wolf Kills To Begin Again

A Yahoo! news story today has spelled out some distressing news about the Gray Wolf.

Gray wolf hunts planned after de-listing

In a remarkable and oft-repeated example of how much the United States Government doesn't care about the sacredness of life, and how much people do care about money, Gray Wolves- once on the endangered and protected list, are now off, and an army of morons is preparing to hunt them back onto the list.

In the Yahoo! story I linked to, there is a pretty telling quote. It reads:

Wildlife biologists estimate there are now 41 breeding pairs in Idaho, in 72 packs. If that number falls below 10 breeding pairs, or 15 during a three-year period, the wolves could be brought back under federal protection.

It's outrageous to me that 15 breeding pairs in Idaho is considered "endangered" for the Gray Wolf, but 41 isn't. One would imagine that they'd be taken off the protected list only after they had expanded in population a bit more. But before these (and many other) perplexing questions are asked, we might as well level the playing field and just say what's really going on: these proud and powerful creatures, whose spirit has been part of the continent of North America since time immemorial, are a danger to the contrived and overblown hunting industry. The myth is that they depopulate elk and deer populations, thus preventing bored idiots from hunting them for sport, and from bringing revenue to the states.

How terrible that doctors and lawyers from the city might have their hunting vacations trod upon by other creatures that actually need to hunt to live, and who never kill for sport! Imagine it!

It goes deeper- how people are choosing to deal with this "problem" is reflective of the distance people have grown from the simple animistic duty we all have to respect life, and to respect the well-being of the animal nations that live alongside us. Farmers claim (as they have always claimed) that wolves destroy and harass their farm animals, and indeed, the government has given farmers a free pass to shoot as many wolves as they can claim are "stalking" their livestock.

So money and guns once again take the center stage of human thinking on these matters of spiritual importance. Why not just get dogs? Since very early times, humans have used herd dogs and sheep dogs and just dogs in general to protect their livestock from wolves. It worked then, it would work now. Instead of going straight to bullets, why not re-engage the rules of nature, and have these canine creatures place each other in check, as they will? Why not consider better ways to contain and protect livestock?

These people are really wrapped up in the myth that they "own" land and that they have the moral ground to decide life and death for other creatures that have been living on this land far longer than they. We may have papers saying that we have the legal right to stay in a place, but we don't "own" land in any sense beyond the shallow perceptions of our ownership-obsessed society. And we certainly don't have the right to hunt creatures onto endangered lists, when the real issue is our lack of flexibility and creativity for learning to co-exist with them.

Farmers were the original cause of the wolf exterminations of the last three centuries- to "protect livestock", wolf populations were excoriated as "pests" and "intruders" and hunted to near nothingness.

The Master Spirit of Wolves will not be an advocate for humanity on the day that our species is represented before the powers of life. If humans can't think more systemically and ecologically about how they approach this matter (and don't get me started on the other animal nations that have suffered at our lack of wisdom) then perhaps we don't deserve the friendship or advocacy of the spiritual powers that we refuse to live in harmony with.

If you want to find out more about this travesty, and find out what you can do to help, EarthJustice has an excellent informative article about it, and lots of contact numbers for environmental protection groups that are fighting for the wolves. You can see it all here:

EarthJustice Press Release

And long live the fighters!