Wolf delisting? It's about time

It appears that Congress will soon take action to remove wolves from protection under the Endangered Species Act, and the environmental groups that have fought delisting for years should not be surprised.

It was entirely predictable that perpetual litigation would lead to fierce frustration and political pressure that would result in seeking an alternative means for establishing state management authority over wolves, and that’s precisely what is happening.

Sens. Jon Tester and Max Baucus of Montana attached a rider to a pending federal budget bill that would “roll back the clock” and reinstate a 2009 rule that delisted wolves in Idaho and Montana, and the legislation “shall not be subject to judicial review.” Even if that legislation didn’t come about, Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg  and other lawmakers from Rocky Mountain states have other delisting bills waiting in the wings with considerable congressional support.

It just so happens that environmental groups have boxed themselves into a corner in the judicial arena as well. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy last week rejected a settlement agreement that would have allowed Idaho and Montana to manage their respective wolf populations. Most of the plaintiff groups agreed to the settlement out of fear that congressional action would undermine the Endangered Species Act.

Too little, too late. The ESA will indeed be undermined — because the legislation exempting wolves sets a precedent for Congress to override the courts in cases where the environmental conflict industry has been riding roughshod over common sense.

Predictably, the groups that have strung out wolf litigation for years are bemoaning the delisting as an affront to science with supreme hyperbole, one group referring to it as Jon Tester’s “wolf slaughter addendum.”

“By law, lifting federal endangered species protections is supposed to be based solely on biology, not politicians enacting their political judgment,” wrote the president of Earthjustice, an organization that makes a living off ESA litigation. “Let the wildlife experts do their jobs.”

Well, that’s exactly what Montana has been trying to do. Montana’s wolf population has exceeded recovery goals for more than a decade and the state has developed a wolf management plan that was approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with abundant scientific review, under the Bush and Obama administrations.

The management plan allows for a regulated hunt that hardly amounts to a wolf “slaughter” because it has provisions to ensure sustainable wolf numbers in the future. The hunt involves quotas for different districts that are adjusted from year to year, depending on wolf numbers.

It is quite different from a bounty system that led to the eradication of wolves from the landscape in the early part of the last century. Wolves will not be wiped out. One needs to look no further than Canada, where there are liberal wolf hunting regulations and persistent wolf populations.

The groups that have gamed the judicial system for years are now reaping what they have sown.