The complaint was filed Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C. by the Humane Society of the United States and the Fund for Animals. It follows a lawsuit filed Nov. 26 by a coalition of environmental groups in the U.S. district court in Denver and another case, also filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, by four prominent national environmental advocacy organizations.
"The agency's decision to strip Wyoming wolves of federal protection is biologically reckless and contrary to the requirements of the Endangered Species Act," Jonathan Loworn, an in-house lawyer for HSUS, said in a statement. "Wyoming's regressive wolf management plan is reminiscent of a time when bounties paid by state and federal governments triggered mass killings that nearly exterminated wolves from the lower 48 states."
FWS announced on Aug. 31 that gray wolf populations in Wyoming had fully recovered. The agency removed all gray wolves in the state from the list of endangered and threatened species and approved a management plan that commits Wyoming to maintaining 150 individuals and 15 breeding pairs within its borders.
Environmentalists were harshly critical of the agency's decision, predicting that it could lead to the extirpation of the wolf in Wyoming.
"Wyoming's anti-wolf policies take the state backward, to the days when wolf massacres nearly wiped out wolves in the lower 48 states," Jenny Harbine, an attorney at Earthjustice, a public interest law firm that frequently represents environmental and animal welfare advocacy organizations, said in a statement. "Our nation rejected such predator extermination efforts when we adopted the Endangered Species Act."
Harbine was referring to policies that overtly encouraged the mass slaughter of wolves and extirpated them from all of the nation except Alaska and parts of Minnesota.
The northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf was included on the list of threatened and endangered species in 1974.
FWS' decision to remove the gray wolf population in Wyoming from that list, and to delegate management authority to the state, followed the removal of gray wolf populations in Idaho and Montana from the list of endangered and threatened species via a "rider" to a budget bill enacted by Congress in 2011.
That legislation followed a court decision that negated a Bush administration effort to remove ESA protection from gray wolves in the northern Rockies.
A website maintained by the state's Department of Game & Fish says that there were more than 300 wolves in the state at the time its management plan went into effect. At least 50 of those wolves have been killed since then.
They include one female who was the leader of a pack that frequented Yellowstone National Park's Lamar Valley and a common sight to tourists. She was killed by a hunter outside of the national park on Thursday.
U.S. Department of Justice lawyers have asked the federal district courts in Denver and Washington, D.C. to transfer the first two challenges to FWS' decision to approve Wyoming's wolf management plan to a federal court in Cheyenne.
Photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; photo by Tracy Brooks.
