Can Wolves Survive as Federal Protection Ends?

KAMAS, Utah, Jan. 29, 2007 — -- There have been several sightings of wolves here, the gateway to northern Utah's Uinta Mountains. Wildlife experts say the animals have likely migrated south from Yellowstone National Park, where they were reintroduced many years ago.

It's one more sign that wolf recovery programs have paid off -- so much so that the U.S. Department of Interior announced today that it is taking wolves off the endangered species list in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, and within the year proposes to remove them from federal protection in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

"This is a major success story," Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett said in a telephone news conference. "We can now recognize a comeback of the wolves."

Scarlett credited the endangered species listing of the Mexican gray wolf and the federal protection it provided the animals.

"Now the endangered species listing is no longer needed in the western Great Lakes," Scarlett said. "In the mountain states, we have exceeded our goals and are getting ready to take wolves off the list there."

All of this is quite remarkable because wolves were nearly shot, trapped and poisoned to extinction. A government eradication program assisted by ranchers in the 1930s decimated the predators, which were a deadly nuisance to valuable livestock.

"They're not the bad guy [and] they're not the savior of the wilderness," said Steve Torbit of the National Wildlife Federation. "They're just an animal trying to figure out how to make a living."

The reintroduction of the gray wolf was made possible by declaring them an endangered species and making it a federal crime to kill them. As a result, wolf packs began migrating here from Canada -- and were successfully bred in Yellowstone National Park.

Today more than 4,000 roam three states in the upper Midwest, and nearly 1,300 can be found in the northern Rocky Mountain states.

Now, the government wants the states in the upper Midwest to manage wolves without federal protection. The same is planned for the intermountain states later this year.