It took the Trump administration about a year to announce their plans to gut the Endangered Species Act. Trump’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) successfully “delisted” the gray wolf at the end of October, just one week before the soon-to-be twice impeached president was trounced in the November election. The move was made official on Jan. 4, giving states like Wisconsin the power to manage their wolf population. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says it is the fourth time the wolf has been federally delisted. This means hunting and trapping. It looked like Wisconsin, “the only state in the country that requires a yearly wolf-hunting season if the animal is not protected under the Endangered Species Act,” would have to wait until at least the fall of 2021 to begin their hunt. This calculation was based on the Wisconsin law that the one wolf hunting season can only be held between November and the end of February, and as officials wanted time to come up with a “scientifically based” quota of how many wolves could be killed.
But as the Republican Party wandered about in the haze of a QAnon fever dream, Republican lawmakers demanded instant wolf hunts, and the Kansas-based hunter advocacy group Hunter Nation was successful in bringing a lawsuit forcing the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to “hastily” set up a hunting season that would begin in February. Hunter Nation’s argument was that the normal winter hunting season had been delayed by conservationist groups and therefore any further delays would just allow those groups to stop the hunting season altogether, and newly elected President Joe Biden and all his environmentalist talk might end cheeseheads’ chances of killing wolves. The “harvest” was supposed to last for one week, but has been called at four days after hunters from Hunter Nation killed at least 216 wolves—over 50% more than the 119 quota set by the DNR. They accomplished this in 60 hours. This is not much of a surprise as, according to the Sentinel, “the DNR sold 27,151 wolf harvest applications. The 2,380 winners (20 times the kill goal of 119) were drawn Sunday.”
Wisconsin held wolf hunting seasons for three years from 2012 to 2014 before the federal ruling returned the wolves to the Endangered Species Act protections. In those three years it took hunters around two months to kill or trap 117, 257, and 154 wolves respectively. Hunter Nation released a statement applauding itself for killing so many wolves so fastly: “Clearly, the population of grey wolves has significantly increased during that time and the DNR must take a serious look at their population models and counting methods.” Conservationists argue that besides modern hunting techniques and weaponry, the choice to hold the hunt during the animal’s breeding season left the wolves vulnerable to this kind of easy slaughter.
But hunters and hunter advocates want you to know that while yes, they killed more than 216 wolves, and yes, many of the wolves may have been pregnant with litters, the fact that they far exceeded the quota set by the DNR isn’t a big deal. This is because the overall quota that was set was 200—81 of those wolves were set aside for the Ojibwe Tribes as a part of their treaty rights. As lawyer for Hunter Nation Richard M. Esenberg told the The New York Times, “The notion that there was this wide divergence between the outcome of the hunt and the number of the wolves that could be hunted simply doesn’t bear up to analysis.”
Of course, this seems to completely fly in the face of the fact that those 81 gray wolves weren’t for a bunch of not Ojibwe Tribes white guys to kill. In fact, the Ojibwe Tribes had no intention of hunting their allotted 81 wolves as they see the gray wolf as a sacred animal. Their claim under their treaty rights to part of the kill quota included their decision not to kill the animals.
Throughout the 20th century wolves were eradicated in every state besides Minnesota, but conservationists, protections, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 helped gray wolves make a comeback. In 1980, Wisconsin had a reported 25 gray wolves. This past year that number was estimated at 1,195. The USFWS says that in total there are “about 6,000 wolves in the lower 48 states” now. The Obama administration attempted to delist the gray wolves in 2009. That move was countered and overturned by a federal judge. The Obama administration’s appeal of this overturn failed in court again in 2017.
There are very real reasons for creating and setting hunting seasons for different animals. In an ideal scenario, hunters would serve the purpose of helping to maintain the delicate balances of human and animal ecosystems. Those balances vary from state to state as population density, agricultural space, and livestock populations are different everywhere. Unfortunately, as can be seen in Wisconsin, these guys just want to kill things to say they did and really had no interest in balance at all. Does this mean that every hunter involved in the killing of gray wolves in Wisconsin is a bad person? Not at all. I’m sure there are a ton of very conscientious hunters in those groups, people who believe they serve an important environmental and spiritual function in that environment. But without meaningful regulation, and without more defined protections, the either/or proposition of delisting species from the endangered list does not seem sound.