Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse for Montana wolves, with the approval of trapping and no quotas during the upcoming 2012/2013 wolf hunt, now the state is proposing to turn the day-to-day management of wolves over to Wildlife Services!!
I’m speechless!!
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From Center For Biological Diversity
For Immediate Release, August 23, 2012
Montana to Give Wolf Management to Federal Agency With Legacy of Wolf-killing
SILVER CITY, N.M.— The state of Montana is proposing to turn most day-to-day management of wolves over to Wildlife Services — the same U.S. Department of Agriculture agency responsible for exterminating wolves throughout the West before they gained federal protection in the 1970s.
In a draft protocol released this month to address wolf-livestock conflicts, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks proposes transferring its authority to decide which wolves will be killed for livestock depredations to Wildlife Services, the federal agency that has killed millions of animals — including thousands of wolves — as part of its work to eradicate and suppress animals considered livestock predators or agricultural pests. The state would retain jurisdiction over public hunting seasons; unlike citizen hunters, Wildlife Services is not limited in where, or how many wolves, it can kill.
“Montana proposes to hand over key decisions on wolves, including how many will survive above a barebones minimum number, to the very federal agency that originally wiped out the West’s wolves,” said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity, a group that has advocated for western wolves for more than 20 years. “With no one looking over its shoulder, a secretive branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, partially funded by the livestock industry, will once again serve as prosecutor, judge and, most especially, executioner.”
According to the proposal, Wildlife Services will respond directly to ranchers’ complaints of cattle killed by wolves and could initiate aerial gunning of the animals it deems guilty, informing Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks of how many it has killed only later. Wildlife Services is funded not only by federal appropriations but by matching funds from livestock associations and/or the state and local counties.
Wildlife Services’ only constraints would come if the wolf population drops below 150 animals or 15 breeding pairs. At the end of last year, 653 wolves, including 39 breeding pairs, survived in the state.
A series of investigative articles this spring by Sacramento Bee reporter Tom Knudson found that just since 2000, Wildlife Services has killed millions of animals using methods that are inhumane, illegal and ignore science. In his 2005 book Predatory Bureaucracy: the Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West, the Center’s Michael Robinson documented multiple instances of the agency circumventing or outright breaking rules intended to protect wildlife.
“Putting Montana’s wolves fully in Wildlife Services’ hands will mean two things,” said Robinson. “More wolves will die, and fewer people will know why.”
Background
As a result of hunting and trapping in Idaho and Montana that was intended to drastically reduce wolf numbers, 545 of the 1,900-plus wolves in the two states have been killed over the past year. Additional wolves have been killed by Wildlife Services under criteria loosened since the removal of wolves from the endangered species list in May 2011.
In its decision last year to circumvent the Endangered Species Act and delist wolves by attaching a rider to a budget bill, Congress bypassed the Act’s requirement to adhere to the best available science. Federal courts had previously ruled that wolf delisting was illegal because the Fish and Wildlife Service disregarded scientific findings that wolves in Yellowstone National Park could become genetically isolated and that the wolf population still occupied only a small portion of its historic range.
Wolves are vital to their ecosystems. By deterring elk from browsing on cottonwood sprigs in low-visibility areas alongside rivers, the return of wolves has resulted in more stream side trees, benefiting beavers, fish and songbirds. By controlling the numbers of coyotes, the presence of wolves has led to increased numbers of foxes and pronghorn. Wolves also provide carrion from their leftovers, which is relied upon by scavenging animals such as badgers, eagles and bears.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 375,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2012/wolves-08-23-2012.html
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The Sacramento Bee’s Exposé On Wildlife Services
Deadly Poison 1080 Compound
The killing agency: Wildlife Services’ brutal methods leave a trail of animal death
Published: Sunday, Apr. 29, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 1A
Last Modified: Wednesday, May. 2, 2012 – 10:52 pm
First of three parts
The day began with a drive across the desert, checking the snares he had placed in the sagebrush to catch coyotes.
Gary Strader, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stepped out of his truck near a ravine in Nevada and found something he hadn’t intended to kill.
There, strangled in a neck snare, was one of the most majestic birds in America, a federally protected golden eagle.
“I called my supervisor and said, ‘I just caught a golden eagle and it’s dead,’ ” said Strader. “He said, ‘Did anybody see it?’ I said, ‘Geez, I don’t think so.’
“He said, ‘If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don’t say nothing to anybody.’ “
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/28/4450678/the-killing-agency-wildlife-services.html#storylink=cpy
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Wildlife Services’ deadly force opens Pandora’s box of environmental problems
Published: Monday, Apr. 30, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 1A
Last Modified: Wednesday, May. 2, 2012 – 10:52 pm
Second of three parts
Like the prow of a ship, the Granite Mountains rise sharply from the creamy-white playa of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
Here, in rugged terrain owned by the American public, a little-known federal agency called Wildlife Services has waged an eight-year war against predators to try to help an iconic Western big-game species: mule deer.
With rifles, snares and aerial gunning, employees have killed 967 coyotes and 45 mountain lions at a cost of about $550,000. But like a mirage, the dream of protecting deer by killing predators has not materialized.
“It didn’t make a difference,” said Kelley Stewart, a large-mammal ecologist at the University of Nevada, Reno.
For decades, Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has specialized in trapping, poisoning and shooting predators in large numbers, largely to protect livestock and, more recently, big game.
Now such killing is coming under fire from scientists, former employees and others who say it often doesn’t work and can set off a chain reaction of unintended, often negative consequences.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/30/4452212/wildllife-services-deadly-force.html#storylink=cpy
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Unforgiving Snares and How They Work
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/30/4452212_a4452108/wildllife-services-deadly-force.html
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Long struggles in leg-hold device make for gruesome deaths
Published: Sunday, Apr. 29, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 15A
Last Modified: Wednesday, May. 2, 2012 – 10:52 pm
No tool in Wildlife Services’ arsenal kills more non selectively – or slowly – than the leg-hold trap.
Since 2000, more than 90 species of wildlife have died by mistake in agency traps, including pronghorn antelope, mule deer, river otters, swift foxes, badgers, porcupines and federally protected bald eagles, government records show.
But whether animals are caught accidentally or not, they often struggle for days and die of exposure, injuries and other causes long before a trapper returns to the site.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/28/4450686/ex-trapper-leg-hold-device-probably.html#storylink=cpy
And this is the agency Montana is going to entrust Montana wolves?
I’m proposing a write-in campaign to the 81 Senators who sold wolves out in the Northern Rockies and delisted them via budget rider. All US Senate Democrats voted for this horror except three, Wyden, Leahy and Levin. I will have more on the write-in campaign soon. We must hold them accountable for what they did and let the world know that Democrats, who say they support the ESA, betrayed wolves, while President Obama signed the bill into law. Obama has delisted wolves twice since he took office, a feat even George Bush couldn’t accomplish.
Now is the perfect time to hold them responsible for throwing wolves under the bus. There’s an election in just 2 1/2 months. We must demand they correct the terrible wrong perpetrated against wolves, letting them know wolves must be placed back on the Endangered Species list, where they won’t be subjected to wolf hunts and brutal state management. We can remind them if they choose to do nothing we won’t pull be pulling the lever for them come November.
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Photo: Courtesy James Balog
Posted in: Wolf Wars, Montana wolves, Wildlife Services War on Wildlife
Tags: Wildlife Services, persecution of Montana wolves, MFWP, stand up for wolves, Michael Robinson, Center for Biological Diversity
Boulder White Clouds Council
Exposing The Big Game
Footloose Montana
Friends of the Clearwater
Lockwood Animal Rescue Center
Louise du Toit
LUPUSLAETUS
Mercy For Animals
Northern Idaho Wolf Alliance (NIWA)
Predator Friendly®- Because Wildlife Matters
Project Coyote
Project: Wolf
The Nature Conservancy
The Ravensong Group
WildEarth Guardians
Wisconsin Wildlife Ethic-Vote Our Wildlife
Wolf And Wildlife Studies: Jay Mallonee (Independent Wolf Biologist)
Wolf Song of Alaska
Wolves in english ! Les loups en anglais !
WWP's Gray Wolf Page
Yellowstone To Yukon Conservation Initiative
Howling For Justice 
USFWS Says Wolf Recovery Is A Success Because Wolves Live…WTF???
April 16, 2014
This takes the cake. In a ridiculous statement (and a foreshadowing of the way their decision on delisting wolves nationally is going to go) the USFWS said:
Gray wolf’s success means it lives
Posted: 04/12/2014 06:32:01 AM EDT
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s update on the status of gray wolves in the West, which it released last week, amounted to an implicit plug for its proposal to lift federal protections for the creature across the lower 48 states.
Wolf restoration has been an “amazing success,” the service said, and “by every biological measure the (Northern Rocky Mountains) wolf is recovered and remains secure under state management.”
The evidence: The number of breeding pairs and individual wolves remains comfortably above the agency’s minimum targets.
In fact, the service does have reason to crow, given what appears to be a reasonably stable wolf population in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming (with a smattering in eastern Washington and Oregon as well.)
Critics of delisting maintain that a sustainable wolf population should be larger than the current 1,691, and don’t trust the states to uphold their part of the recovery bargain.
We have more faith in state wildlife officials — and meanwhile trust Fish & Wildlife to intervene, as it promises, “if relisting is ever warranted.”
Read more: http://www.sentinelandenterprise.com/editorial/ci_25553138/gray-wolfs-success-means-it-lives#ixzz2z7APn7kv
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Have they even glanced at the 1,521,113 comments submitted concerning their disgusting National Wolf Delisting proposal? Have they heard of Idaho’s plan to kill most of their wolves? Do they care one whit about the thousands of wolves who’ve been killed since their delisting in 2009? Is this the “amazing success” they’re talking about? That “by every biological measure the (Northern Rocky Mountains) wolf is recovered and remains secured under state management“? Are they saying this with a straight face? Are they joking?
The material point is they’ve already made up their minds wolves will be delisted nationally, no matter what the public thinks because it’s not about what the American people want. It’s about what their customers want, you know the ranchers, hunters and politicians they serve.
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The Unsavory Truth Behind the Move to Take Wolves Off the Endangered List
The feds have dismissed three scientists from a wolf panel for, guess what, raising concerns about wolf delisting.
April 16, 2014 / By Tracy Ross
Just weeks after calling for the removal of gray wolves from the Endangered Species List, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now under fire for allegations that it intentionally excluded three prominent scientists—whose views diverged from the Service’s on delisting—from an upcoming peer review process.
In June, Fish and Wildlife called to delist gray wolves across the Lower 48 states, leaving an exception for the struggling Mexican wolf in the Southwest. Agency director Dan Ashe told the media that the gray wolf had recovered to the point that it could thrive and even enlarge its territory without federal oversight. Several wolf advocates and some members of Congress disagreed. Once wolves are delisted, their management will fall to individual states.
But in order for the delisting process to continue, federal law requires that a team of scientists evaluate the basis for the motion. As such, Fish and Wildlife hired a private contractor to select and oversee the peer review panel. According to Fish and Wildlife spokesman Gavin Shire, the agency isn’t supposed to know who the panelists are. But the Associated Press revealed that the contractor chosen to assemble the panel had provided a list of candidates that redacted their names but included their professional resumes. Armed with this information, the Service found three esteemed wolf biologists, who—and this is the key part—had expressed concern with the gray wolf delisting plan. They also, along with 16 other prominent scientists, had signed a letter expressing this concern. Shortly thereafter, Fish and Wildlife effectively “delisted” the three scientists from the panel.
The three are identified as Dr. John Vucetich, Dr. Robert Wayne, and Dr. Roland Kays. All have published extensively on the wolf and are considered preeminent experts. Yet the Center for Biological Diversity’s Bret Hartl reports that the Service rescinded their invitations because, in the agency’s words, they have an “unacceptable affiliation with an advocacy position.”
READ MORE: http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/08/16/wolves-endangered-species-list-delist-panel-scientists?fb_comment_id=fbc_386534721476207_1937752_388683194594693#f5dbc27245f234
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Top Photo: Courtesy Nature: Cold Warriors
Bottom Photo: Courtesy Earth Island Journal
Posted in: Wolf Wars
Tags: USFWS, national wolf delisting, absurd comments, irresponsible management, wolves are NOT recovered, stand up for wolves, Dr. John Vucetich, Dr. Robert Wayne, Dr. Roland Kays, Center For Biological Diversity
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on April 16, 2014 at 11:04 pm Comments (17)Tags: absurd comments, Center for Biological Diversity, Dr. John Vucetich, Dr. Robert Wayne, Dr. Roland Kays, irresponsible management, national wolf delisting, stand up for wolves, USFWS, wolves are NOT recovered