Defenders Magazine
Get Defenders Headlines
Get the latest wildlife conservation news and information... right when we post it online.
Defenders Magazine
Defenders in Action: Judges Double Up in Favor of Wolves
It was the legal equivalent of hitting the lottery twice on the same day. On February 1, Defenders won two important court decisions that will help retain protections for endangered wolves in much of the country.
In early 2003, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cut protections for the gray wolf by downlisting the animals from "endangered" to "threatened" on the Endangered Species Act list in much of the lower-48 United States—despite the fact that the creatures have only returned to 5 percent of their historical range. Defenders and its allies quickly filed a lawsuit challenging the decision.
Defenders considered the downlisting to be politically motivated, and noted that it was improper to claim the species had made progress toward full recovery since gray wolves are currently found in only a handful of states. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones sided with Defenders and chastised the Bush administration's policy as merely an attempt to remove the wolf from the Endangered Species Act list as soon as possible.
"Judge Jones recognized that the Fish and Wildlife Service was removing protections based on political expediency, not science or the law," says Nina Fascione, Defenders' vice president for field conservation. "We are certainly thrilled with the progress of wolf recovery to date, but with wolf populations in only eight of the contiguous states, clearly the task of wolf recovery cannot be considered complete."
On the same day as Judge Jones' ruling, a federal court judge in New Mexico issued a resounding decision for Mexican wolf recovery efforts. District Judge M. Christina Armijo found that a complaint filed by several cattle and ranching organizations attacking the Mexican wolf reintroduction program lacked any basis, and dismissed the case. Defenders had intervened in the case to defend the federal effort to restore Mexican wolves, as the ranchers' suit likely would have halted the program had it been successful.
"The decision vindicates the hard work of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in putting Mexican wolves back in their rightful place—in the forests of the Southwest—and affirms the importance of science, not fear, in this work," says Susan George, senior counsel for Defenders.
Both the gray wolves and their Mexican wolf cousins were nearly hunted to extinction in the lower-48 states in the first half of the twentieth century. The recent legal decisions give a major boost to the continuing effort to restore these wolves to their rightful place in the web of life.
