Safari Club Int’l & NRA: No More Hotel California for Gray Wolves

Wolves have a place in our ecosystem. Just not the ballroom, the ballet recital, or the back yard.

Well, now we know the face of “the beast” that “steely knives” can’t kill … and it’s not a wolf’s.

It’s the beast that’s born when we start prioritizing feelings over facts. The feelings in this case are understandable: Wolves are beautiful, wolves do have a place in our ecosystem, wolves were once nearly extirpated by hunting, and it would have been a tragedy if they’d gone extinct.

But that doesn’t change the facts: Wolves are no longer endangered, and we are now remembering why it was that our settler forebears chose to hunt them to near-extinction. Fact is, wolves are scything through populations of big-game animals and livestock. Fact is, wolves can and do kill for fun and leave carcasses to waste. (Ask a Montana rancher if the “surplus killing” is as rare as the previous article makes it sound.)

So it was that this past Friday, Safari Club International (SCI) and the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) submitted an opening brief to the Ninth Circuit court of appeals detailing the many ways in which a district court in California misinterpreted the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) delisting rule.

In 2020, the FWS removed gray wolves across the lower 48 United States from the ESA lists of threatened and endangered species. A federal district court in California overturned that decision. SCI and NRA appealed, and Friday’s brief represents the first major step in that appeal wherein our organizations will stand up in court to defend the effective implementation of the ESA.

Since 2003 and across four Presidential Administrations, the Service has repeatedly tried to remove gray wolves from the ESA. Gray wolves have exponentially grown in numbers and habitat, and they no longer require the ESA’s protection. Federal courts, however, have largely overturned these rules based on technical legal issues—to the detriment of social tolerance of wolf populations and the Service’s ability to free up resources to recover other species that are truly at risk.

“Courts have made the ESA like a Hotel California for gray wolves,” said W. Laird Hamberlin, SCI’s Chief Executive Officer. “SCI has fought to remove wolves from the ESA lists for 20 years. And we’ll keep fighting until the courts finally acknowledge the science showing that gray wolves are no longer in need of the ESA’s protections. This appeal is another step toward responsible state management of gray wolves, which includes incorporating legal, regulated hunting.”