By Kathleen Gray
Detroit Free Press Lansing Bureau
LANSING — The day before the Natural Resources Commission is meeting to determine whether it will set a wolf hunting season this fall, Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill that will allow that vote and kill a petition drive meant to ban the hunt.
“This action helps ensure sound scientific and biological principles guide decisions about management of game in Michigan,” Snyder said in a statement after signing the bill today. “Scientifically managed hunts are essential to successful wildlife management and bolstering abundant, healthy and thriving populations.”
The issue has blown up in Lansing since the Legislature designated the gray wolf as a game species in December and authorized the Natural Resources Commission to set a hunt. After that vote, opponents of the bill turned in more than 250,000 signatures to the Secretary of State, hoping to get a hunting ban on the statewide ballot in November 2014.
But the bill signed by Snyder will supersede the law passed last year, rendering the petition drive as merely symbolic.
The move infuriated the animal rights groups, whose members crowded into legislative committee rooms and outside the Capitol to protest not only the law that will allow the Natural Resources Commission — in addition to the Legislature — to designate game species and set hunting seasons for those species, but also the circumvention of the petition drive.
“We’re supportive of hunting and outdoor recreation, but we certainly didn’t like the part where the people of Michigan will no longer have a say,” said James Clift of the Michigan Environmental Council. “We were opposed to the bill because it was cutting people out of the process.”
Jill Fritz, the Michigan director of the Humane Society of the United States, which helped spearhead the petition drive, said Snyder’s support of the bill is a betrayal.
“More than a quarter million people in the state of Michigan signed the petition, and he is blatantly ignoring them,” she said.
The bill was pushed mostly by legislators from the Upper Peninsula, where the gray wolf population has grown from six in 1973 — when the species was put on the endangered species list — to 658 today. The wolves are concentrated in three areas of the Upper Peninsula, including some residential areas such as Ironwood. But the bill also got bipartisan support when it received final passage last week.
The Natural Resources Commission will meet Thursday in Roscommon to vote on a recommendation from the Department of Natural Resources to set a hunt for 43 wolves this fall.