For Wolves, Justice Deferred is Justice Denied
The poacher of a mother wolf in western Oregon just got a slap on the wrist for intentionally killing the endangered animal.
Meager punishment for such a heinous crime illustrates how tragically the justice system is failing wolves.
It also reflects a failure nationwide by state and federal wildlife managers to provide the protections necessary for these magnificent and important animals to fully recover.
Wolf OR-28 was found dead in October 2016 after being illegally shot in the Fremont-Winema National Forest. She and her mate, called the Silver Lake pair, were parents to at least one pup born that spring. They also were only the second known pair living in western Oregon, where wolves are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.
This wolf was not killed in self-defense, as prosecutors made clear at Colton Tony Dick’s hearing Aug. 19 in Medford’s federal district courthouse. He knew exactly what he was doing when he shot her.
Killing a federally endangered species carries the potential for significant jail time and fines up to $100,000.
But what punishment was meted out to this individual who robbed a wolf family of its breeding female and robbed us all of a fully protected animal?
Dick, from Oakridge, received what is called a deferred sentence. He will serve a year of supervised release and was fined $2,500. He is not allowed to hunt for one year and must perform 100 hours of community service. After that, he can withdraw his guilty plea and prosecutors will seek to dismiss the charge. As if nothing ever happened.
Forget the ballpark — the punishment was not even in the same ZIP code as the crime.
What happened in Medford is a small part of the ugly drama wolves have been drawn into in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation.
In Oregon, the state prematurely stripped wolves of state protections in 2015, when merely 81 known wolves were in the state. Then, this summer, Oregon’s management plan was changed to make it easier for wildlife managers to kill wolves for conflicts with livestock. Other revisions open the door to public wolf hunting and trapping.
Farther north, Washington kills wolves under the euphemism of “managing” livestock conflicts. The state lets ranchers and farmers off scot-free if they kill a wolf and say it was attacking their cattle, despite a lack of supporting evidence. Officials there have killed 30 state-endangered wolves, even though only 126 wolves were confirmed statewide this spring.
This is happening everywhere wolves live in the United States. Since wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains lost Endangered Species Act protections in 2011, they have been considered entirely disposable and are actively hunted. The same thing happened in the western Great Lakes states when wolves were temporarily federally delisted. Without protections in those regions, more than 5,000 wolves have been killed in state-sanctioned hunting and trapping seasons that were instituted the moment wolves lost protections.
The Trump administration now wants to take that model and spread it to the rest of the country. In March, Trump’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed stripping wolves of federal protections throughout almost the entire lower 48 states.
This is exactly what Americans do not want. During the open comment period on Trump’s proposal, more than 1.8 million public comments opposing federal delisting were submitted to the Interior Department, based on internal tallies by our organization and other wildlife advocacy groups.
Members of a scientific review panel were united in their strong criticism of the proposed delisting. Among their concerns was the fact that wolves are not fully recovered and still face threats — most notably from humans — for which they still need protections.
Wolves in Oregon and across the nation will not fully recover until they have the necessary safeguards to ensure their survival. That requires continued state and federal protections and sufficiently harsh sentences for anyone who illegally kills wolves. Anything less perpetuates the same attitudes that nearly drove wolves extinct in the last century.
Weiss is senior West Coast wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that advocates for endangered wildlife and wild places.
An earlier version of this was published by the Oregonian.
