My colleague at Western Watersheds Project, Talasi Brooks, put out this press release yesterday after reviewing the results of a public records request to Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG). She discovered some truly horrifying stats on the wolves killed in Idaho since January 1, 2020 by IDFG, Wildlife Services, and recreational killers of this keystone species. It ranges from hunters slaughtering weeks-old puppies to mature wolves dying in traps, all symptoms of the pervasive anti-wolf culture in Idaho.
The significance of these findings is especially important because of this week’s ‘announcement’ by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that they intend to delist wolves nationally by the end of the year. Thus, Idaho (where wolves were delisted in 2011 by a Congressional end-run around the courts) offers a glimpse into the future: wolf haters going to hate and kill puppies for no reason other than this animosity, the federal Wildlife Service agents will ruthlessly pursue and gun down animals from helicopters, and these highly-intelligent and social animals will suffer in unspeakable ways simply for being top predators on a landscape that needs them.
Here’s a primer on the post-delisting landscape as predicted by NRDC, and it does a pretty good job of identifying why the states aren’t ready to manage this species in an integrated and science-based way. The uncovered records from Idaho show the on-the-ground effects of such delisting, and it’s truly despicable.