Wolves
The West has reinvigorated its war on wolves and the Obama Administration has sadly capitulated to Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, in what is yet another example of its poor policy toward public lands that originated with the Salazar appointment to Interior and has not improved at all. This is been one of the weakest performances for progressives in the entire administration (along with education policy) and an area where the administration has almost total control to set policy (unlike say, closing GITMO which we can say is disappointing but where the president is highly constrained by Congress).
Wyoming classifies wolves as predatory animals that can be killed by any means and without limit in more than 80 percent of the state, and in parts of Idaho, there are no limits for when or how many wolves can be killed. Not to be outmatched, Montana nearly doubled the bag limit on wolves this year, extended the hunt season to allow killing of pregnant females and refused to listen to pleas by park biologists to create a safety buffer just outside the park’s boundaries to protect straying research animals.
These hunts are a throwback to the not-so-distant days when wolves were ruthlessly persecuted and nearly wiped out from the entirety of the lower 48.
Today wolves live in only about 5 percent of their historic range and have less than 1 percent of their former numbers.
Despite these dismal figures, the Obama administration has proposed to remove protections for wolves across most of the country. With numbers going down from hunts and protections gone, wolf recovery that is broadly supported by a strong majority of the American public, has cost taxpayers millions, benefits ecosystems, and is a tremendous Endangered Species Act success story will be flushed down the drain.
Awful. But this hasn’t received much political pushback, which is another piece of evidence to me of the decline of the environmental movement, which today is as weak as it’s been politically since the 1950s.