Depressed and Disgusted About The Plight of America's Wolves
A view on wolf hunting: Wolf management should be based on science and conservation — not on fear
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/3648319-view-wolf-hunting-wolf-management-should-be-based-science-and-conservation-—-not
By Howard Goldman on Jan 5, 2015 at 7:23 p.m.
In mid-December a federal district court ordered that wolves in the Great Lakes region be put back on the federal Endangered Species Act, where they had been for four decades prior to 2012. After making promise after promise to persuade the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to delist wolves, including a pledge to wait several years before opening up hunting and trapping programs, state authorities immediately let loose trophy hunters and commercial trappers. They killed more than 900 wolves, which was on top of the toll taken by poaching, road kills, disease and injuries, weather and other mortality factors.
Decades of slow population growth and recovery were undone in just three short years following delisting.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources allowed the majority of the wolves to be killed with the use of leg-hold traps and snares. Eighty-four percent of the wolves killed met their end in these traps in this year’s late season, languishing for hours or more than a day or two in the vise grip of these devices.
State officials set an upper limit of 250 wolves for killing this year, but they allowed trophy hunters and trappers to overshoot it. This year, they killed 272 gray wolves. That’s hardly a way to treat a species just off of the list of “threatened."
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http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/grand-canyon-gray-wolf-may-have-been-shot-dead
Grand Canyon Gray Wolf May Have (Has) Been Shot Dead
December 31, 2014 | by Justine Alford
We could be in for some deeply saddening news shortly as a northern gray wolf has been shot and killed in Utah, and wildlife groups fear that it could be the same animal that was spotted recently in the Grand Canyon - the first wolf seen in the area for 75 years.
The female, radio-collared gray wolf was shot dead by a hunter on December 28 near the south end of the Tushar Mountains near Beaver, south-western Utah, after being mistaken for a coyote. When the hunter realized that the animal was not a coyote, he immediately informed the Division of Wildlife Resources who then contacted the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The federal agency then identified the animal as a three-year-old female that was fitted with a collar near Cody, Wyoming, at the beginning of the year. Although environmental groups are seriously concerned that this could be the lone wolf that had been recently sighted numerous times in the Grand Canyon, this cannot be confirmed until results from DNA tests come back.
Gray wolves were once common in Arizona, but they were almost wiped out in the 1930s and hadn’t been spotted in the Grand Canyon since 1939, according to the US Fish & Wildlife Service. This is why conservationists and environmentalists were delighted when one lone ranger turned up in October near the North Rim of the famous landmark. Officials tried to catch the animal to replace the inoperative radio collar it was wearing, but failed. They did, however, manage to scrounge some DNA from its faeces, which revealed its identity as a female from the northern Rocky Mountains, more than 450 miles away. The wolf was later named “Echo” and was photographed several times on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau.
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“Wolves are an endangered species in Utah, but the Justice Department has systematically failed to enforce the Endangered Species Act in respect to illegal shootings of animals supposedly mistaken for unprotected wildlife species; notwithstanding that a fundamental rule of firearm and hunter safety is never to pull the trigger without being 100% sure of the target.”
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