War on Wolves and Science

War on Wolves and Science

Having been eradicated from the lower 48 states due to unfettered hunting during the early twentieth
century, gray wolves (Canis lupus) have been a hallmark species for the success of the Endangered Species Act. More than twenty years after being listed as an endangered species, whose recovery is mandated under the ESA, in 1995 gray wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone National Park from Canada. Over the past 22 years of ESA recovery protections, the gray wolf population has swelled from 31 to 1,782 in the Northern Rocky Mountain region. Though far from fully recovered, political pressure has been rising to reintroduce legal wolf hunting throughout much of its range despite continued evidence that such hunting severely hampers recovery efforts while providing little benefit to livestock ranchers.

Having been extirpated in Washington nearly a century ago, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) began returning
to the wild lands of eastern Washington in 2009. The Endangered Species Act protections afforded to the population of wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone were so successful that their population levels have begun to rise and the wolves have begun returning a level of ecological balance to their ancestral habitats. However, their continued recovery is being threatened by disregard for and suppression of scientific research, as well as expedited state-sponsored slaughter on behalf of ranching interests.

At the forefront of this fight is the political suppression of the research on wolf-livestock interactions undertaken by Dr. Rob Wielgus and the Large Carnivore Research Laboratory at Washington State University. Due to political pressure placed upon the administration of the University by cattlemen’s organizations and a local state representative, the College of Agriculture has placed limits on the speech of Dr. Wielgus and his lab concerning wolves, removed grant funding from Dr. Wielgus, and subjected him to a series of wrongful disciplinary actions as a means of forcing silence on lethal control issues, oftentimes at the behest of a local Republican legislator.