According to Local News8 in Pocatello, Idaho, an interim Wyoming Joint Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee has picked one of six wolf management bills to sponsor. The proposed bill will allow for hunting seasons on wolves as long as the state maintains its minimum requirement of breeding pairs of wolves (15).

Interestingly, this proposed bill will stick to the dual status labeling of wolves, meaning that wolves near the Yellowstone area will be classified as game animals and everywhere else in the state as predators.

It appears that Wyoming will be left out of the delisting process that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service intends to push through by the first of the year, mostly because the courts didn’t like their wolf management plan, one that was approved by the USFWS.

The Wyoming Attorney General’s office states that the two wolf classifications can be defended in court. It may not be defending the dual status that will be the legal problem however. Consider this if you will.

The USFWS named the Northern Rocky Mountains region at first an experimental population of gray wolves. That was followed by renaming the same Distinct Population Segment of wolves, in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and parts of Eastern Washington, Oregon and small portion of Utah, endangered.

This past summer the USFWS removed the wolves in this area from federal protection but was soon placed back under protection when Judge Donald Molloy decided he didn’t like the idea too much.

Shortly after Molloy’s ruling, Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, D.C. ruled that the USFWS couldn’t create a Distinct Population Segment within a Distinct Population Segment and as a result he placed the Western Great Lakes population of wolves back on the Endangered Species List.

If Friedman’s ruling is not challenged and defeated in the courts, then surely how can the USFWS leave Wyoming out of the mix and essentially create a new Distinct Population Segment within the existing DPS and consider it for delisting?

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive.”

Tom Remington

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