While a war on wolves continues throughout much of the West, two environmental groups have filed a lawsuit in Montana courts to halt the hunting of wolves in that state.
HELENA, MT. — The war on wolves continues through much of the West, but two environmental groups are seeking to halt what they call “a bloodlust” in Montana.
Following up on their lawsuit filed in October, the groups – WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote – petitioned a state court here on Nov. 10 for a preliminary injunction to halt the wolf hunt until the merits of their earlier filing can be fully considered.
Their October lawsuit alleges that Montana officials are violating federal law by relying on stale and insufficient scientific data in order to authorize the killing of roughly 40 percent of the state’s wolf population.
The two-month old open season of wolves in Montana has already claimed 55 animals. Currently, hunting of wolves with rifles is legal and wolf-trapping is set to begin on Nov. 28.
“Montana’s hunting and trapping regulations allow for the killing of 456 wolves,” according to John Horning, the executive director of WildEarth Guardians. “That includes the use of strangulation neck snares and night time hunting on private lands with spotlights.
“It’s all part of Montana’s quest to kill 40 percent of its wolves just this winter.”
By law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should protect against threats to endangered species at federal level, Horning explains.
Meanwhile, he says, state wildlife agencies should promote science-driven, non-partisan management of species that are not endangered.
But environmental advocates argue those systems are failing at both levels.
After being exterminated in the early 20th Century, wolves were re-introduced in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995. Initially, the animals were protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, but wolves were de-listed in 2020 at the urging of the ranching industry.
Outside of the protected confines of Yellowstone, Wyoming has long permitted a shoot-on-sight approach to roaming wolves. In 2021, lawmakers in Idaho and Montana elected to go that same route, passing laws to drastically slash wolf populations.
In Idaho, for example, Gov. Brad Little ponied up $600,000 to trim the state’s wolf population by as much as 90 percent by granting individual hunters and trappers the authority to wipe out whole packs of wolves.
Idaho also allowed measures long seen as outside the ethical bounds of fair hunting, including wolf bounty programs, aerial hunting, the use of snares and night-hunting through the use of night-vision goggles and thermal sights.
While politics have always shaped predator conservation, those recent events have left environmentalists horrified that decades of their work are now threatened.
They point to a recent study that refutes much of the justification for extreme wolf hunts in Idaho, Montana and Wisconsin.
That paper — which has been peer-reviewed by several of the nation’s leading biologists and wildlife advocates – found that the justifications for wolf hunts misrepresents currently available data and causes confusion in the public’s perception of wolves.
The report – entitled “A New Era of Wolf Management” – found that, although livestock deaths are used as a major factor in the justifications for wolf hunts, the number of sheep and cattle killed by wolves never exceeded 0.21 percent and 0.05 percent respectively.
The recently filed request for a preliminary injunction halting the wolf hunt in Montana also alleges that the state is overstepping its wildlife management authority by allowing wolves to be killed near federal lands, particularly Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.