The federal government has killed about 40 endangered wolves in northwestern Montana since the wolf recovery program began in 1987. Environmentalists say that number is far too high. This week the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Humane Society of the United States, A Hunter's Voice and the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services division, detailing how the agencies have violated the Endangered Species Act by killing dozens of wolves over the past decade in response to livestock predation. If government agencies don't ease up on the trigger in Montana, conservation groups vow to file a lawsuit to try to stop them. The warning follows the federal government's recent proposal to downlist wolves throughout the United States, including a motion to reclassify endangered wolves in Montana from endangered to threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Conservation groups say it is far to early to consider delisting.
Wolves from Canada recolonized northwestern Montana in and around Glacier National Park in the late 1970s and first reproduced in the area in 1986. While wolves in Yellowstone National Park and Idaho are classified as non-essential experimental populations, wolves in northwestern Montana are a wild population that receives full protection under the Endangered Species Act. They have not been getting the extra protection mandated by the law for a fully endangered species. There is supposed to be a big distinction and you can hardly tell the difference. The agencies do not give enough consideration to non-lethal alternatives when wolves prey on livestock as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, conservation groups claim.