The Fish and Wildlife Service bows to pressure from antigovernment groups, removing the animals’ endangered status

By James William Gibson

The US Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent announcement that it is beginning the process for removing gray wolves across the country from the protection of the Endangered Species Act surprised no one. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s mid-1990s reintroduction of gray wolves — a species virtually extirpated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho marked a triumph for conservationists and ranks as one of the most striking fulfillments of the Endangered Species Act. But as I have reported here and here, the wolves quickly met enemies.

By the early 2000s a loose coalition of hunters’ groups, outfitters, and ranchers — along with the many disaffected men embracing militia groups, local “sovereignty” and states rights, particularly rights to use public lands without federal regulation — coalesced around the idea that wolves represented icons of the hated federal government. The wolves, they all-but-screamed, constituted lethal threats to deer and elk, livestock, and ultimately, people. The long, bitter wolf war reached its climax in the summer of 2011, when Congress took the unprecedented act of removing the wolf populations of the Northern Rockies from the endangered species list. In May 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service, weary of the many problems involved in wolf management (or, rather, public relations management), delisted gray wolves in the Western Great Lakes states, where some 4,400 wolves resided. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming subsequently initiated hunts and the use of government marksmen to reduce wolf numbers from around 1,700 to a much lower level.

The FWS’s proposed delisting of gray wolves across the country is simply the continuation of the agency’s long retreat in the face of wolf hater intimidation. Still, it’s important to understand how the FWS legitimizes its abandonment of wolves. A close examination of the FWS’ proposed rule change is a case study in the politicization of science. The FWS report excels at cherry picking, choosing certain scientific studies while rejecting others. It’s also an excellent example of bureaucratic hand-waving, simply dismissing long established facts whenever they become inconvenient. The final result is like a weird game of scientific Twister: The FWS bends itself into all sorts of contortions to conform to a political agenda.

The article continues here: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/25/is_the_far_right_driving_gray_wolves_to_extinction_partner/

Science Was Afterthought in Developing Preferred Alternatives for Wolf Recovery.

Jun 27, 2013

http://www.peer.org/news/news-releases/2013/06/26/politics-dominated-wolf-de-listing-meetings/

Washington, DC —The federal government’s plan to remove the gray wolf from the protections of the Endangered Species Act was hammered out through political bargaining with affected states, according to documents obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Contrary to requirements of the Endangered Species Act that listing decisions must be governed by the best available science, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service presided over a process in which political and economic considerations were at the forefront..

The 52 documents produced by Fish & Wildlife Service detail how the “National Wolf Strategy” was developed in a series of closed-door federal-state meetings called “Structured Decision Making” or SDM beginning in August 2010. The meetings involved officials from every region of the Service and representatives from the game and fish agencies of 13 states. The SDM process featured –.
•A “Focus on Values. Determine objectives (values) first, and let them drive the analysis.” An SDM flow-chart starts with Problem and goes to Objectives, to Alternatives and then to Consequences at which stage a small box labeled “Data” finally comes into play;
•An explicit political test “Where should wolves exist? (emphasis in original) What does the public want? What can the public tolerate?”; and
•A matrix to weigh alternatives on a scale of “legal defensibility” then “public acceptance” followed by “wolf conservation” and finally “efficiency.”

“These documents confirm our worst suspicions that the fate of the wolf was decided at a political bazaar. The meeting notes certainly explain why no outside scientists were welcome,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch who had been seeking the records since April 2012. “From what we can see, Structured Decision Making was structured primarily to deal out the lower-48 population of gray wolves.”.

Under a federal proposal currently out for public comment the gray wolf would be stricken from the federal list of threatened or endangered species. The Mexican wolf, with only a handful remaining in the wild, would keep its endangered status but no protected habitat would be delineated for it..

Much of the meetings were devoted to assuaging state threats to sue to halt wolf reintroductions. The tenor of these discussions was captured by a map titled “New Fantastic Alternative” which allowed unlimited hunting of gray wolves in Colorado and Utah. It also confined Mexican wolves to portions of Arizona and New Mexico..

“The Obama administration keeps preaching integrity of science and transparency but seems to practice neither on any matter of consequence,” Ruch added, pointing to PEER’s detailed complaint on how politics smothered the recovery plan developed for Mexican wolves by a team of scientific experts. “In simplest terms, these documents detail how the gray wolf lost a popularity contest among wildlife managers.”.

These foundational SDM documents obtained by PEER will likely provide fodder for the lawsuits that will almost certainly follow the expected final federal decision to de-list the gray wolf.