Molloy will get second shot

Inter Lake editorial

Judge signals wolf hunt may be short-lived

Montana finally came out on top in the long-running legal wars over wolves, but it appears the win may be short-lived.

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy last week denied a request for an injunction to stop the first organized wolf hunts to be held in Montana and Idaho in decades. He found that the hunts wouldn't have long-term impacts on wolf populations.

And he's right about that. Wolves will outbreed the modest hunting quota of 75 wolves in Montana and 220 wolves in Idaho. That's about 20 percent of the official population estimate of 1,350 wolves in both states, but one must consider that the estimate is based on confirmed counts. There are likely more wolves on the landscape, and it will be interesting to see if those quotas are actually reached this year. The number of wolves harvested could fall well short of those limits.

What's disappointing about Molloy's ruling is that he has tipped his hand, strongly indicating that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service likely violated the Endangered Species Act when it excluded Wyoming wolves from the delisting decision earlier this year.

"The service has distinguished a natural population of wolves based on a political line, not the best available science. That, by definition, seems arbitrary and capricious," Molloy wrote.

He added that the environmental groups who filed the lawsuit "have demonstrated a likelihood of success' in restoring protections for wolves under the Endangered Species Act.

The fact that the judge has already offered that opinion, prior to giving the larger questions of the case a full hearing, is not good.

We would argue that there is nothing "arbitrary" about how wolf recovery and delisting has been pursued by the state of Montana.

It has been a thorough, good-faith process that has been under way for years. Annual wolf recovery goals, in terms of the number of wolves and reproducing packs, have been consistently met since 2002. The population will persist as long as there is a degree of public goodwill toward wolves.

That goodwill is put at risk when environmental groups, the courts and the federal government repeatedly deny the state's ability to manage wolves.