In August 2017, when the white supremacist Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, I was on a family trip to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks in Wyoming. We saw a lot of wildlife, including a pack of wolves in Yellowstone. It was a nice experience, but I don’t have some fetish about wolves. I don’t want them to go extinct, but I understand that ranchers don’t want them roaming around on their property. It’s just that I think there are solutions beyond hunting them down when they leave the protected environment of the park.

Most obviously, we can easily compensate ranchers for any loss of livestock. As for hunting wolves for sport, that obviously depends on their status as an endangered species. In October 2020, the Trump administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed “protection from all gray wolves in the lower 48 states except for a small population of Mexican gray wolves in Arizona and New Mexico.” It was a contentious decision opposed by conservation groups that argued delisting was premature. In 1967, the gray wolf population in the lower 48 states had dropped below 1,000, but they were protected in 1978 and the population grew to about 6,000 in 2020. It was a nice success story, but a tenuous one.

In the 1980’s, an extensive study located no wolves in Yellowstone Park, but they were re-introduced in the mid-1990’s. The park service says that 23 wolves have been killed since they were delisted, meaning that only 91 remain in Yellowstone. Fifteen of those wolves were “harvested” in Montana. These are wolves that left the confines of the park, but it should be noted that hunters are luring them with bait.

Yet, we are subjected to nonsense like this:

A representative of the Montana hunting industry said outfitters and guides supported the preservation of wolves inside Yellowstone. But once the animals crossed the boundary, sustainable hunting and trapping should be allowed, said Mac Minard, executive director of the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association.

Minard questioned whether the 20 wolves killed so far this year after leaving Yellowstone should even be considered “park wolves”.

“That just doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why aren’t they ‘Montana wolves’ that happened to go into the park?”

Each one of the culled wolves has been identified by the park. You can download a spreadsheet on each kill here, so they are not “Montana wolves” that went into the park. The problem is exacerbated by changes in Montana law which eliminated quotas on how many wolves can be hunted near the park.

The park superintendent, Cam Sholly, has urged Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, to shut down hunting and trapping in the area for the remainder of the season.

But Gianforte, who himself trapped and killed a Yellowstone wolf last year, violating state hunting regulations, has not been receptive to the request, according to a letter in response to Sholly obtained by the Associated Press.

“Once a wolf exits the park and enters lands in the State of Montana it may be harvested pursuant to regulations established by the [state wildlife] Commission under Montana law,” Gianforte wrote on Wednesday…

…Urged by Republican lawmakers, Montana wildlife officials last year loosened hunting and trapping rules for wolves statewide. They also eliminated longstanding wolf quota limits in areas bordering the park. The quotas, which Sholly asked Gianforte to reinstate, allowed only a few wolves to be killed along the border annually.

The original quotas were meant to protect packs that draw tourists to Yellowstone from around the world for the chance to see a wolf in the wild.

Under new rules, Montana hunters can use bait such as meat to lure wolves for killing and trappers can now use snares in addition to leghold traps.

The result has been as swift as it was predictable: an immediate 20 percent reduction in the Yellowstone wolf population. The slaughter may have been worse in Wisconsin.

As many as one-third of Wisconsin’s gray wolves probably died at the hands of humans in the months after the federal government announced it was ending legal protections, according to a study by University of Wisconsin scientists released in July.

I don’t think this is a sustainable trajectory. If the wolves aren’t already endangered according to whatever formula is used for determining such things, they surely will be before much longer. The Department of the Interior is reportedly doing a year-long study to determine if the gray wolf should be re-listed, but that is not good enough for 78 House members who have petitioned Secretary Deb Haaland asking for (temporary) emergency protection while the study is conducted. Haaland, who is the first Native American cabinet member, is getting a lot of pressure on the issue from the Native community. It seems to me that she ought to consider the emergency listing because the kill rate is alarmingly high.