Wyoming criticizes feds over wolf rules
By The Associated Press
CHEYENNE – Wyoming says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shouldn’t try to force the state to rewrite its wolf management law as a condition of ending federal protections for gray wolves in the state.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is taking public comments through Friday on its plan to end federal Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies. It’s the latest move in a lengthy debate over management of the animals, which were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in the mid-1990s. The federal agency wants to have a new plan in place by the end of the year.
Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal’s office this week submitted comments accusing the feds of working to end wolf protections in Idaho and Montana while leaving them in place in Wyoming.
“In the strongest possible terms, the state urges the service to end its practice of allowing politics and public relations concerns to drive the decision-making process for the new delisting rule,” wrote Ryan Lance, Freudenthal’s deputy chief of staff.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Montana last month reinstated federal endangered-species protections for gray wolves in the three states.
The Fish and Wildlife Service had removed federal protections for the wolves in March but reversed itself in response to Molloy’s ruling in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups. The environmentalists claimed that wolves wouldn’t be adequately protected under state oversight.
In his court order blocking the states from taking over wolf management, Molloy singled out Wyoming’s wolf management plan for stinging criticism. Under the Wyoming plan, wolves would have been classified as predators that could be shot on sight in most of the state.
Wyoming has committed to keeping at least 15 breeding pairs of wolves and 150 individual wolves in the state. Lance said there’s no doubt that the state’s current laws and regulations would allow the minimum required number of wolves to survive.
“The state’s current wolf management scheme allows the state to maintain its share of a recovered wolf population,” Lance said. He added that there would be no legitimate biological reason to end federal oversight in the other two states but not in Wyoming.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission last month announced that it was revising its wolf management regulations to try to satisfy federal concerns.
However, Richard A. Cole-man, the acting deputy regional director for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver, told the game department that Molloy had indicated that the state needed to change its laws to ensure long-term conservation of wolves.
In a letter to Wyoming Game and Fish earlier this month, Coleman said it seemed premature for Wyoming to revise its existing wolf management regulations because “legislative fixes must occur first.”
Lance said Molloy’s order can’t legally force Wyoming to change its existing wolf management law. And he noted that Wyoming’s Legislature doesn’t convene until mid-January, making it impossible for the state to change its law in time to meet the federal agency’s plan to publish a new rule ending federal protections that same month.
“By demanding that the state make statutory changes, the service has illegally prejudged the outcome of the delisting decision-making process,” Lance wrote.
Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Montana, said Wednesday that he hadn’t yet reviewed Wyoming’s comments. But he said Molloy’s order made it plain that the judge believed Wyoming’s law was the problem – not state regulations based on that law. He said the agency hasn’t seen comments from Montana or Idaho yet.
“The key was the court – they hammered on the law,” Bangs said. “And I think that’s something that Wyoming’s going to have to look at it detail.”
An interim Wyoming legislative committee last week backed a bill to sponsor in the upcoming Wyoming Legis-lature that would keep the predator classification for wolves and allow wolf-hunting seasons in certain areas of the state as long as at least 15 breeding pairs were maintained.
An attorney for the environmental groups that challenged the delisting of wolves said Wednesday that environmentalists see Wyoming’s law as the root of the problem.
“Nothing has been done to create a legal safety net for wolves in Wyoming – the steps that were needed to respond to Judge Molloy’s wolf ruling,” said Doug Honnold of Earthjustice.