http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2013/09/the_endangered.html
Posted by Kevin Hartnett September 13, 2013
The Endangered Species List has a sacred status in American life, and you might think that simple arithmetic is enough to decide which animals require a place on it. As the ongoing controversy around the status of the gray wolf shows, however, defining an endangered species is anything but straightforward.
The Endangered Species Act was signed into law in 1973, providing federal protection for animal species that were “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion” of their historical range. An editorial in Nature on September 11 explains that based on that definition, in 1978 the gray wolf was declared endangered in the lower 48 states. Over the next three decades its numbers rebounded, and today there are about 4,000 gray wolves in the Great Lakes region and 1,700 in the northern Rockies. As a result, in June the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recommended that gray wolves be removed from the Endangered Species List. It sounds like a perfect success story.
Many scientists and academics, however, think the FWS decision is opportunistic and flawed.
Back in July, Roberta Millstein, who studies the history and philosophy of biology at the University of California, Davis, wrote on the academic blog New APPS, that the decision to remove gray wolves from the list was “arbitrary, capricious, and inconsistent.” The main point of contention for Millstein and others is how the species of gray wolf is defined. In order to support its new recommendation about gray wolves, the FWS narrowed its definition of what counts as a gray wolf: Previously the Eastern wolf was considered a subspecies of gray wolf but the FWS reclassified the Eastern wolf as a species in its own right. The distinction is important because if gray wolves do not include Eastern wolves, then the calculation about whether gray wolves have recovered a “significant portion” of their historical range no longer needs to take into account the eastern United States. And that makes it easier to justify removing their endangered status everywhere.
So how do you define a species? It’s a hotly contested question. When the FWS pared Eastern wolves from gray wolves, it cited a 2012 paper which argued that species should be identified based on a range of factors, including “genetic markers, morphometric analysis, behavior, and ecology.” Millstein and others claim that the 2012 study was written by the FWS for the express purpose of justifying the preordained reclassification of the gray wolf. In her July blog post, she notes that the study was published in the long-dormant journal North American Fauna, which is issued by the FWS, and which, prior to the 2012 study, last published an article in 1991. Millstein looks more favorably on the definition of a species set forth in the Endangered Species Act itself, which defined a species as “multiple loosely bounded, regionally distributed collections of organisms all of the same species or subspecies.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service is a surprising target for the type of double-dealing charges we associate more frequently with Wall Street or the National Security Agency. To explain why the FWS might act with anything but the best interests of the gray wolf in mind, Millstein cites the environmental publication Earth Island Journal, which has accused the FWS of conducting a “long retreat in the face of wolf hater intimidation” by a “loose coalition of hunters’ groups, outfitters, and ranchers.” For its, part, the FWS says it is simply being pragmatic: By delisting the relatively healthy populations of gray wolves, it hopes to concentrate its resources on protecting the Mexican wolf, a more imperiled subspecies of gray wolf.
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Exposing the Big Game 
State and federal wildlife agencies are not listening to anyone but themselves, sportsmen and ranchers; but then they always have been such from their inception. Ranchers and sportsmen irrationally hate wolves. Few listen to science, reason, or outsiders. Wolves do not need to be “managed” in general; maybe problem wolves or packs, and nonlethal means should be mandatory, in place and tried. Oregon has set up such a wolf policy program and I think we can look to CA to set up a wolf friendly policy. Wolves will manage their own populations. Killing them in general is just bat sh– crazy for a number of reasons: It does not make any ecological sense and it disrupts their families and likely will cause problems the wolf killers allege, but not proven. They should not be managed by the states mentioned because it is political management of a species. They should not be de-listed because they have not yet filled up the many viable niches still available in their old ranges. I have been observing for years that talking to the wolf haters is like talking to the far right and not so far right republican brain, which makes up and lives in its’ own universe and is impervious to logic, science, facts or reason. Wolves should not be in the hands of state management, especially in states of such proven hostile mentality as MT-ID-WY-WI. Before a state can manage the wolves therein they should have in place a policy like OR.
Anthropocene Era:
Regarding wolves: The wildlife agencies, state and federal, are out of control. This should not be a surprise when you consider their history. They were never, from their inception, friendly to predators. This country has hated predators from the beginning as has mankind around the world, and has set on an extermination policy and/or practices, from the early settlements onward, wiping out flora and fauna, as this country was settled and ones before. Settled, that means the Anthropocene takeover of the world, loss of biodiversity and loss of wildlife and habitat and pollution on a grand scale. We look to the wildlife agencies for what they are not, never were. They have always primarily worked for the rancher, the farmer, the sportsmen, and mans’ pecuniary interests, not wildlife, unless the two meshed, providing license fees, sport, political favor. Now we are back to an 1880’s approach to predators slightly improved with allowance for marginalization and ungulate farming for the sportsmen and license fees. It is and always has been political management. Actually, our yokel forebears almost wiped out everything, a lot with government approval and support. True wilderness has been reduced to the last 2%-5%; that, to put it in perspective, is what we are fighting so hotly about. To MT-WY-ID-WI-AK-WA yokels, when they look out, it seems a lot, not! Our ancestors marched across this country committing genocide against Native Americans and wildlife, flora and fauna, especially the predators, and still cannot grasp ecology, not even the wildlife agencies.
USFWS cowing to a special interest group is nothing new. When the desert tortoise was listed as endangered, the developers around Las Vegas pitched a fit and it was downgraded to threatened. When it came time to list critical habitat for the Cactus Ferruginous Pygmy Owl, it was the Southern Arizona Homebuilders Association who decided what critical habitat was. If the species has an charisma at all, listing it as endangered or threatened these days takes it out of the realm of biology and into the realm of politics.