Listening to Science is Essential to Saving the Wolves

When I turn on the National Geographic channel, there is always a scene of the predator chasing its prey. However, for the past 20 minutes, the story was about the prey and its family causing viewers to root for the prey: the underdog. However, the story does not include that the predators are suffering from habitat loss and other human-impacts. In our case, the predators are the underdogs. Wolves in particular are facing dire consequences caused by human actions and political debates. Wolves are often portrayed as the villains in stories and movies, and that viewpoint translates to real life with ranchers protecting livestock and hunters protecting their sources. The status of wolves is suffering due to a constant debate of how much protection they should receive, which, sadly, prioritizes politics over science.

The Endangered Species Act was formed in 1964 to provide guidelines to protecting animals in a time of human dominance. With this act also came a list of endangered and threatened species, which has grown longer over time. In 1974, gray wolves were among the first species listed as endangered. Since then, wolves across the U.S. have faced the consequence of premature delistings guided by political decisions. The Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf was stripped of ESA protection when delisted in 2008 because they met the recovery goals created with a lack of scientific evidence (Bergstrom et al., 2009). The recovery goals required a small number of breeding pairs (10, sustained for 3 consecutive years), but the major flaw was the lack of requiring genetic connectivity between the wolves from different areas. Genetically isolated populations cannot maintain a healthy genetic flow due to inbreeding, decreasing the genetic diversity (Hendrick, 1996). These compromises in the recovery plan were favoring the politics of livestock ranching.

A similar experience occurred in Oregon when ESA protection of wolves was removed in 2015 by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, according to Oregon Wild. Again, this was done prematurely as numbers were too low and the Wolf Conservation and Management Plan—the only remaining protection for the wolves—was softened too much to maintain support of ranchers and hunters. The plan lowered the threshold for when states can kill wolves, removed requirements for non-lethal confilct deterrence, and opened door towards public hunting and trapping.

Wolves are not receiving the protection they should be due to people in charge attempting to please the opposers while trying to protect the wolves. Recovery goals should not be lowered to get more people on board; they should be based on scientific studies and rules that promote a healthy population that includes a healthy number of individuals and promotes genetic connectivity naturally. While there are reasons to control the harmful impact of wolves, they still need protection from the people taking their land and their food to avoid the removal of gray wolves from existence.