Predator hatred and ancient superstitions threaten gray wolves. 

In New Mexico and Arizona, Mexican gray wolves — the smallest and most endangered subspecies — face extirpation. If this population, estimated at only 319 is lost, Mexican grays will almost certainly go extinct because just 35 to 40 are thought to survive in Mexico, where ranchers still poison them and where public land is scarce. 

In Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where the Great Plains gray wolf subspecies is protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the population is estimated at between 4,900 and 5,000.

Recovery of the subspecies in the Northern Rockies — the northwestern gray — is being undone by current hunting and trapping regulations in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming geared toward suppressing their numbers. The population in these states, where federal protection has been removed, is thought to be under 3,000. Northwestern gray wolves also lack protection in parts of eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and northern Utah, but recovery there is ongoing.

Representative Boebert, who introduced one bill, says federal wolf protection is the work of “leftists [who] want to cower to radical environmentalists.”

Gosar’s bill isn’t the only legislative assault on wolves now pending in Congress. The “Pet and Livestock Protection Act,” introduced by representatives Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), would strip ESA protection from northwestern and Great Plains grays in the contiguous states. It was passed by the House on December 18 and is now before the Senate. Given current animosity toward these wolves throughout their range, ESA protection will likely be needed in the future. That can’t happen if the Pet and Livestock Protection Act becomes law because it contains a provision blocking judicial review of the delisting mandate.

Congresswoman Boebert charges that ESA wolf protection is the work of “leftists [who] want to cower to radical environmentalists.” The ESA was signed into law by President Nixon, whose administration listed gray wolves in the Northern Rockies as endangered. In 2011, President Obama signed a law delisting wolves in Montana and Idaho, claiming they’d recovered; a year later, his administration delisted wolves in Wyoming.

“The deceitful names of these bills perpetuate the myth that wolves are a major cause of farm animal deaths,” says Camilla Fox, founder and director of Project Coyote, which advocates for all wild canids. “Years of state and federal data show that wolves are responsible for less than one percent of farmed animal deaths.”

Recovery of gray wolves in the Northern Rockies and Midwest had been one of the greatest success stories in American wildlife management. It was also the most controversial, with brutal confrontations between wildlife advocates and livestock interests backed by conservative politicians like Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who recycled superstitions about wolves, claiming, for example, that they “chase women in Russia.” Eventually, the wildlife advocates prevailed. And in 1995 and 1996, northwestern gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after an absence of 70 years.

When Great Plains grays lost ESA protection in Wisconsin in 2021, hunters killed 218 in less than three days, demonstrating that delisting wolves guarantees their slaughter. The following year, when a group of wildlife advocacy groups sued the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, ESA protection was restored.

In Wyoming and Idaho, where ESA protection was removed, wolves are choked to death by neck snares and gunned down from helicopters.

Montana permits each hunter and trapper to kill 15 northwestern grays per season. So, an individual can kill 30 until a statewide quota of 458 (the highest since delisting) is reached — this from an estimated population of only 1,091. Wyoming and Idaho permit northwestern grays to be choked to death with neck snares, killed in their dens (both pups and nursing mothers), gunned down from helicopters by managers, shot at night, mauled to death by dogs, and run down and crushed with snowmobiles — a sport called “wolf whacking.” Idaho even pays a bounty on wolves.

South of Interstate 40, cutting through the top third of Arizona and New Mexico, Mexican grays are protected by the ESA as a “non-essential, experimental population,” meaning they can’t be killed unless they depredate livestock. When they move north of I-40, they become fully endangered and are usually captured by wildlife authorities and returned south of I-40.

This artificial boundary prevents the subspecies from repopulating its historic range far north of I-40. The U.S. recovery goal, insisted on by the livestock lobby and game and fish bureaucrats in both states, is capped at around 320 for eight years, at which point delisting could be considered. “That’s not recovery; it’s a wild zoo,” declares Rewilding Institute carnivore biologist David Parsons, who led Mexican gray recovery for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 1990 to 1999 and served on the 2010 recovery team. 

A prime example of the animus toward wolves is the fiction gushing from New Mexico’s Catron County. The state’s counties are eligible for relief money as compensation for natural disasters. So, the Catron County Commission has declared wolves a natural disaster, requesting that Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham grant it $907,000 to “adequately staff the wolf investigation program.” To protect the county from wolves, it has further asked that she mobilize New Mexico’s National Guard, Air National Guard, and State Defense Force. (The governor has not complied.) The Catron County Commission has been declaring wolf natural disasters since 2006, when there were only about two dozen Mexican grays in all the U.S.

“We are scared,” Catron County commissioner Audrey McQueen told Outdoor Life magazine last year. “We’ve had deputies posted at the school this year so our kids can go out and play.” There’s no record of a Mexican gray even raising a lip at a human. McQueen, a big-game outfitter, went on to complain that wolves have “changed [elk] behavior.” Translation: With a few wolves back in the ecosystem, elk now act like elk, fleeing when hunters stop their trucks and roll down a window. 

In natural abundance, wolves and other predators prevent cervids (deer, elk, caribou, and moose) from overpopulating and destroying wildlife habitat, including their own. 

Mexican gray wolves do kill livestock, for which ranchers are compensated. But losses have been grossly exaggerated.

So far, there have been no formal studies of CWD cleansing by wolves. But wildlife biologist Paul Paquet offers this: “In the early 1990s, when I was at the University of Calgary and when CWD was first becoming an issue in Saskatchewan and Alberta, I monitored CWD occurrence, plotting it against areas where wolves were well established. In these areas, it was clear that CWD wasn’t occurring in ungulates. I continued looking at areas with established wolf populations in Minnesota, Montana, and Idaho, and CWD wasn’t occurring there either. There have been a few CWD breakthroughs in wolf habitat, as in Yellowstone and Idaho. But even there, CWD isn’t very prevalent.”

Representative Gosar, author of the Enhancing Safety for Animals bill, charges that Mexican gray wolves “routinely kill livestock, pose serious safety risks to humans and pets, excessively prey upon game animals, and reduce recreational opportunities.” 

Again, Mexican gray wolves don’t attack humans. The 319 or so Mexican grays spread across the 150.5 million acres of Arizona and New Mexico cannot measurably affect game populations or limit hunting opportunities. According to available records, the number of pet kills by Mexican grays confirmed by the Fish and Wildlife Service is one — a dog in 2024.

Mexican gray wolves do kill livestock, for which ranchers are compensated. But losses have been grossly exaggerated. For example, in 2022, Robert Gosnell, former director of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in New Mexico, reported that he found fraudulent Mexican gray wolf depredation reports in which inspectors were instructed by agency brass to list, without evidence, livestock losses as wolf kills. For each dead cow, ranchers get 75 percent of the average fair market value from the USDA’s Livestock Indemnity Program.

Gosnell told the nonprofit news organization The Intercept that some depredation reports were “illegal” and that “my guys in the field were going and rubber-stamping anything those people asked them to.” The Intercept reported that Gosnell’s probe into bogus data “landed him in hot water” and that a superior ordered him to “back off,” explaining that APHIS had an “arrangement” with ranchers.

There’s much management of wolves in America. But even where they have ESA protection, there’s scant management for wolves. 

To many state and federal wildlife officials in the West and politicians in Washington, wolf management means killing. The ESA requires the “best available science” for saving troubled species and subspecies from extinction. But much wolf management, and all wolf management legislation now before Congress, is bereft of science.