Settlement in Gray Wolf Case

Defenders of Wildlife announced Friday that a coalition of environmental groups had reached a settlement with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in their effort to ensure protection for the endangered mexican gray wolf. These groups, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, included Defenders of Wildlife, the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project, New Mexico Audubon Council, New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, University of New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, The Wildlands Network, Sierra Club, and Grand Canyon Wildlands Council.

Mexican gray wolf populations began to drop in the early 1900s due to ranching and development in the Southwest, and entirely disappeared from the wild by the 1970s. After being listed under the ESA in 1976, it was bred in captivity and finally reintroduced in 1998. (You can see a FWS chronology of the wolf's ESA recovery program and its milestones here.)

Just a few years later, in 2003, the Bush Administration handed control of managing mexican gray wolf populations in Arizona and New Mexico to the federal and state "Adaptive Management Oversight Committee," which was led by an official from Arizona Game and Fish. The Committee applied a set of "standard operating procedures, which included the rancher-friendly "Standard Operating Procedure 13" that required it to permanently remove a wolf from the wild (by killing or capturing it) if it killed three livestock in one year. According to Defenders' press release, this was done without regard to "an individual wolf’s genetic importance, dependent pups or the critically low numbers of wolves in the wild." According to this AP story on the case, there are only 50 Mexican gray wolves in the wild now, which is about half as many as the Recovery Plan envisioned by this time.

Defenders et al sued to stop SOP 13 in federal district court in Arizona in May 2008. Last week's settlement, which gets rid of SOP 13, settles the suit. FWS will also reassert control over the Committee under the settlement, as you can read in the press release and in the Arizona Daily Star, here. Arizona wildlife officials responded that the environmentalists are exaggerating--that they never controlled the committee, anyway. At the same time, the Arizona officials intimated that they would be working to make sure that the interests of ranchers continued to be represented in future Committee actions.