Wolves Are Being Crushed, Snared, and Hounded — We’re Fighting Back

We consider it our duty to stand in the way of people possessed with hatred in their hearts for wolves and now conducting an appalling assault on the forebears of the domesticated dogs who enrich our lives in so many ways. Wolf packs in the Northern Rockies are in disarray, battered, and assaulted by men with an array of steel-jawed traps and neck snares, packs of dogs, and even snowmobiles that they use to run over the animals.

Right now, Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy are leading the legal charge in federal court to restore Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for wolves in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. We are fighting state-sanctioned assaults, enabled by lawmakers who are acting with ignorance and malice, conducted with a ruthlessness out of whack with the many benefits that wolves bring to ecosystems and the economy.

We’re arguing that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has turned its back on science and on the law. In 2009, the agency promised to restore protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies if state lawmakers and wildlife managers acted recklessly toward wolves. They’ve reneged on that promise.

There’s no other way to read their behavior.

State lawmakers, with tacit federal approval, are permitting year-round, unlimited trapping of wolves. They are allowing trophy hunters to use night-vision scopes to kill them 24/7. They even allow wolf haters to run them down with motorized vehicles and crush them. And they pay bounties when they bring back a dead wolf.

What more can the states do to show recklessness? Perhaps by allowing legal use of poisons or allowing people to drop bombs on them from drones? What they are doing now is extreme by any measure.

To be sure, these are not wildlife management policies. They are expressions of an irrational hatred of the animals. It’s a free-for-all when it comes to killing wolves. Imagine the terror the survivors feel after their pack and family members have been choked out with a neck snare or killed by a pack of dogs or chased down with a snowmobile.

To stop these ruthless, open-air acts of cruelty, our legal team filed a carefully argued pleading in U.S. District Court in Montana, laying bare the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s reliance on flawed population data and illegal assumptions in not restoring protections for wolves after seeing how the states have so bungled their management. And just this week our team was in the courtroom making the case before a judge who has deep familiarity with this topic.

Our message was irrefutable: without the restoration of federal protections, wolves face a continuing assault that they cannot withstand.

We expect to see a formal ruling from the federal judge in just a matter of weeks.

We Are Still Fighting to Protect Wolves from Michigan to Washington

We can win this case in the Northern Rockies. Just as we did in 2021 when we secured a courtroom injunction against wolf killing in Wisconsin when the state unleashed a hoard of trophy hunters and trappers who slaughtered over 200 wolves in fewer than 60 hours.

And like we did in another crucial legal battle for wolf protection across the rest of their range in the lower 48 states In 2022, we won a critical case in a U.S. District Court in northern California to block the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from removing federal Endangered Species Act protections for wolves across the entire country (with the exception of the already exploited population in the Northern Rockies).

If we had not won that case, we might have seen trapping and hounding resume in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Utah, and other states with wolves.

After our victory in federal court 2022 reversing the FWS’s removal of wolves nationwide from the ESA, the agency filed an appeal. Three years later that appeal is still pending and we remain diligent to ensure that the district court ruling still stands as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit takes up the case.

We’re still holding the line.

Readying the Snowmobiles Aren’t Weapons Act in Congress

We aren’t active just in the federal courts.

We are poised to introduce the Snowmobiles Are Not Weapons Act in Congress.

This legislation arose from our work to bring justice for the poor female yearling wolf in Wisconsin who was run over last year by trophy hunter and rancher Cody Roberts. Roberts ran over the wolf for fun — in a practice known as “whacking” or “thumping.”

After wounding her by crushing her with the snowmobile, he tormented and tortured her in a local barroom before shooting her dead in a littered back alley. In Wyoming, it’s legal for a person, at any time of the year, to run over a wolf for fun.

The SAW Act will stop this savagery. It will halt the grotesque practice of using snowmobiles or other motorized vehicles to run down and kill wolves on federal lands — an act of cruelty that no modern society should tolerate.

Wolves Are a Benefit to Humanity and Not a Threat

Wolves gave humans the gift of dogs in our lives. It was the association of humans with wolves that resulted in the domestication of the dog that forever changed the human story. Dogs have been our faithful companions and give us so much joy, as well as serving roles in guarding, herding, and in law enforcement and military service.

Wolves are also essential to healthy ecosystems. They are intelligent, family-oriented animals who deserve respect and protection. They feel pain and suffering just like dogs do.

They are a bulwark against the spread of a brain-wasting disease — known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) — infecting deer and elk in the West and the Upper Midwest. Where there are wolves, there is far less spread of CWD, because the wolves selectively remove afflicted animals, preventing further spread of the disease.

And wolves, by exerting influence on prey populations, reduce densities of deer and elk and reduce the frequency of auto collisions with these animals. And, in a similar way, they reduce densities of cervids and thereby reduce their impacts on crops and commercial forests.

The wolves are the best wildlife managers we could find, having evolved over the eons with their prey species.

Your support allows us to fight for them, whether it’s in the federal courts and to advance vital legislation in Congress.

In the 19th and early part of the 20th century, we just about wiped them out, in an era where our technology was more primitive. We shouldn’t repeat this shameful persecution of these remarkable animals, enabled by highly efficient technologies that give the animals no chance.

We’d never tolerate this kind of cruelty and savagery heaped upon domesticated canines. We shouldn’t allow this assault on the wild ones.