From the Center for Biological Diversity. I am acquainted with a few of these people, including the director, Kieran. I have worked with them a bit on a few things here and there. I love what they do. Theirs is one of the most effective, kickass environmental groups out there.
Background: A wolf from Wyoming left the state, apparently wandered all the way through Utah down to the Grand Canyon in Arizona where it was photographed and caused quite a sensation. Wolves used to inhabit this region, but they have not been seen in many years. Further, wolves are rare to absent in Utah. It seems to have left the Grand Canyon and wandered again 150 miles north of the Grand Canyon to Beaver, Utah, where it was shot and killed. Utah apparently has no laws protecting wolves and in fact, encourages and even promotes killing them, although few if any wolves reside in the state.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has idiotically taken wolves off the Endangered Species list even though they are very much in trouble in a number of states. The feds turned wolf management over to the states. Most every state that has wolves has then embarked on a wild wolf-massacring campaign. These campaigns have occurred in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming in the West and in the Great Lakes area of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
A federal judge has recently halted the Great Lakes states’ wolf slaughter “management.” There really is not any management going on at all in most of these states. Instead all there is is wild, unrelenting wolf slaughter. It is unknown what effect this massacring will have on wolf populations, but it is conceivable that at some point, they may reduce the population so low that it may need to go back on the Endangered Species list again.
Certainly wolves need to be fully protected in places like Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and Iowa. Wolves are being killed in Washington, Colorado, Iowa and Utah where population numbers are very low.
It’s what we feared the most. Echo, the wandering wolf who became a worldwide sensation after showing up at the Grand Canyon this fall, has likely been gunned down in Utah.
Here’s what we know: State wildlife officials have confirmed that a 3-year-old female wolf with a collar from Wyoming was shot Sunday night by a hunter outside Beaver, Utah – about 150 miles north of the Grand Canyon. Echo is the only Northern Rockies gray wolf that has been confirmed this far south, and DNA evidence will most likely show that she’s the victim.
Once again we have to mourn a dead wolf. Once again we see this same horrific pattern. It’s normal for younger wolves to leave their pack and set off looking for a new mate and new territory. But again and again – in Colorado and Iowa, in Washington and now Utah – these wolves have been gunned down in horrific cases of malice and mistaken identity.
Smart as they are, wolves don’t read border signs, and they can’t tell an ignorant human with a rifle that they aren’t coyotes. The result is another dead wolf to add to the 640-plus already killed this year by guns, traps and poisons.
The wolf haters, no doubt, are delighted with the latest killing and are determined to keep this bloody campaign going. They have influential friends like Utah’s own Congressman Rob Bishop, the powerful new head of the House Natural Resources Committee, who has vowed to end protection for wolves from coast to coast — making what happened near Beaver neither illegal nor rare. The government of Utah has even spent $800,000 on lobbyists to strip protection from wolves so they can be freely killed in the state. They don’t want to learn to live peacefully with wolves. They want to destroy them.
Sadly there will only be one Echo, the first wolf to hear her howls ring through the Grand Canyon in more than 70 years. If she has indeed been gunned down, we won’t forget her. All wolves deserve to the chance to to roam freely and survive.