Wisconsin’s Brutal Winter Hunt Shows Why Wolves Need Federal Protection
In just three days, more than a quarter of state’s wolves killed
When the Trump administration removed Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves, advocates like me who have battled for the future of the iconic North American species knew what would happen next.
In a bloody spectacle that could play out in other states with long histories of anti-wolf sentiment, Wisconsin wasted no time. Just weeks after wolves lost their federal protection as an endangered species in January, Republican lawmakers pushed to open a winter wolf hunting and trapping season. The state’s Natural Resources Board narrowly rejected the proposal, but on Feb. 2, the Kansas-based group Hunter Nation Inc. brought a lawsuit and forced the February wolf hunt.
The state’s Department of Natural Resources received nearly 30,000 applications for the winter hunt (each cost just $49 for Wisconsin residents); the agency granted 2,380 licenses, putting 20 hunters in the field for every wolf in the quota.
The wolves never stood a chance.
In just 72 hours in late February, hunters and trappers killed more than 200 wolves — well over the initial quota of 119 set by the state and 20% of Wisconsin’s estimated total wolf population.
This hunt was unprecedented in many ways. First, it happened against the sound advice of the state’s own experts, who concluded that a hunt in the middle of the breeding season would cause unprecedented harm to wolves.
Second, the hunt ignored concerns of the region’s tribes, many of whom hold the wolf, or ma’iingan, sacred. As the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission explained in a statement released on the hunt’s opening day, “To many Ojibwe communities, hunting in late February, a time when fur quality is poor and wolves are in their breeding season, is regarded as especially wasteful and disrespectful.”
Wisconsin has been down this road before. In 2012, wolves were removed from the federal endangered species list in Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. A federal judge restored protections in 2014.
But in the two and half years that wolf hunting and trapping were allowed, more than a third of the region’s entire wolf population was killed.
Proponents of wolf hunting in the Great Lakes states tend to view wolf recovery in a dangerously reductive manner. To them, “recovery” is the bare minimum number of wolves needed to prevent extinction — and anything above that is literally fair game.
In Wisconsin, this cutoff is just 350 wolves — a number set more than two decades ago by state managers hostile to wolf recovery. Until Wisconsin rewrites its wolf management plan to reflect current science, anti-wolf forces will continue to push to bring the state’s population down to just 350 wolves, destroying years of progress toward wolf recovery in the state.
Supporters of wolf hunting in Wisconsin paint a grim picture of a livestock industry besieged by out-of-control packs of heretofore unkillable predators. In reality, less than a fraction of one percent of Wisconsin’s farms experience conflicts with wolves, and those that do get compensated for their losses.
Moreover, “managing” wolves with bullets does not actually protect livestock. The best available science shows that killing wolves and other predators can actually increase the risk of predation for cattle.
Hunting does not target wolves involved in conflicts. It destroys stable family groups and creates lone wolves that can’t effectively hunt native prey — so they turn to livestock. And states like Wisconsin that are so obviously eager to hunt wolves ignore numerous studies that have shown that non-lethal methods can effectively prevent conflict between livestock and predators.
Time and time again, conservationists have watched with dismay as states have given hunters or other special interest groups effective control over the management of endangered species.
Wolves are far too important to the health of our ecosystems to be trapped in this cycle where the fate of the species is decided by politicians and lobbyists and not science. Wisconsin’s appalling rush to slaughter its wolves — and its plans to do it again later this year — show why wolves desperately need federal protections restored.
Collette Adkins lives in Minnesota and is carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
To sign the Center for Biological Diversity’s petition to protect America’s wolves under the Endangered Species Act, click here.
