Wyoming’s governor Dave Freudenthal received a letter from Mitch King, regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Montana, stating that Wyoming had until May 1, 2007 to come up with an acceptable wolf management plan or they would be excluded from the wolf delisting process. Freudenthal had already told King it would be impossible for the Wyoming legislature to pass a plan before May 1.

On the surface it appears like a timing issue but it’s really about who is going to be in control. According to an article by Whitney Royster of the Jackson Hole Star Tribune, Freudenthal says the feds know what Wyoming’s laws are and how the wolf will be managed.

But the governor says that under the law approved by the Legislature during its recent session, Wyoming can’t adopt a new wolf management plan until the federal government changes its rules to allow killing of wolves to protect big game animals before delisting. Federal officials have begun the process of amending the rules to allow such wolf control, but the changes aren’t expected to be finalized until next year.

Wyoming’s attorney general Pat Crank questioned why the USFWS can’t proceed with the delisting using the existing laws.

“You know what Wyoming law is going to be, if they meet the preconditions in that law, so just write the rule as if the plan was going to be in effect,” Crank said Monday. “I have no idea what they’re doing; it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

King insists only to refer back to the only existing wolf management plan that he feels Wyoming has that was created in 2003. That plan he says is unacceptable.

According to the Billings Gazette, Ed Bangs, the federal wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Helena, said that they need more than just the state’s new management laws. They need an approved plan.

“The bottom line is this isn’t the service doing things for the state, in terms of us saying, ‘this is how the state is going to manage wolves,’ ” Bangs said. He said the rulemaking process includes looking at the relationship between the law of the various states and their respective wolf management plans. He said the Fish and Wildlife Service looks at the management plans as the state professional wildlife managers’ commitment of how they’re going to manage wolves.

Bangs said his agency can’t “somehow dream up how the state might somehow manage wolves. That’s the state’s job, to tell us how they’re going to manage wolves.”

While Wyoming is still trying to negotiate some kind of agreement to be included in the delisting process with Montana and Idaho, they are still proceeding with their lawsuit against the USFWS over the 2003 wolf management plan.

In the meantime, the USFWS will be hosting a public hearing in Cody, Wyoming to listen to citizens’ concerns about the delisting process. Much of this meeting is expected to focus on the impact wolves are having on game herds, especially elk.

Two who will be in attendance are State Rep. Pat Childers, R-Cody and Joe Tilden, president of Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife. Childers is the chairman of the House Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee and was one who pushed for the legislation on wolf control. Both men have real concerns about the impact of the wolf on game herds and say that the feds need to turn the management of the wolf over to the state soon.

Until delisting occurs, the state should have the power to manage wolves, he added. Like Tilden, he cited concerns for big game.

“Let us manage for impacts to wildlife,” Childers said.

Prior legislation produced a plan that FWS supported at first and then said wouldn’t work.

“We played the game of trusting them before,” he said. “We won’t play that game again.

“We don’t waste our time to develop a plan until they delist and settle the lawsuit and grant us interim management.”

Both Childers and Tilden cited a G&F study about a low cow-calf ratio for elk in Sunlight Basin and the relocation of elk to Heart Mountain where the ratio is healthy.

“Why’s that? Generally we think it’s wolves,” Childers said.

So there you have it. Wyoming believes that with the legislation they just passed along with an existing wolf management plan, the USFWS has everything they need to go ahead and include Wyoming in the delisting process. The feds in the meantime insist on sticking to their guns and saying that the legislation is only part of the equation and they don’t recognize the existing wolf management plan and wants Wyoming to enact a new one, one that Wyoming says they can’t construct before May 1.

All of this will more than likely become moot as no matter what Wyoming does, or Idaho and Montana for that matter, wolf advocate groups are likely going to sue the USFWS to stop the delisting. This entire process may be tied up in the courts for years.

Tom Remington

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