As Wolf Populations Rebound, an Angry Backlash Intensifies

A similar backlash is occurring in Europe, where EU wildlife policies led to a wolf comeback, followed by massive retaliation as the animals behaved as apex predators do.

In the United States, the assault on wolves has ramped up in several northern Rockies states where restrictions have been lifted: Hunters and ranchers are shooting and trapping wolves legally, running them over with high-powered snowmobiles, slaughtering pups in their dens, and pursuing their prey after dark using night goggles, a practice considered unethical by the hunting community. Advocates for wolf protection are still fighting to restore the species, but as the wolf expands its territory, resistance to such efforts — or to any restoration of protections — is growing more widespread and more fierce.

Wolves are no longer federally protected in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and in a small section of northern Utah. The 4,000 or so wolves that occupy Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan have federal protections, as do wolves in California, western Washington, western Oregon, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Colorado is in the throes of an intense debate over a new wolf population being introduced there by wildlife officials. It is a microcosm of the debate taking place across the U.S. and in Europe.

In 2020, Colorado voters, in an urban-versus-rural divide, narrowly approved a plan to bring 30 to 50 wolves back to the state. Wolves are native there but had been absent for decades. The first 10 wolves were reintroduced in 2023, but the state has had a problem sourcing other wolves to finish the reintroduction. Wildlife agencies in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho all turned down the request. Oregon was planning to supply wolves, but so many of its animals had been illegally poisoned and killed by other means that state biologists decided against the transfer.

Colorado arranged to import up to 15 wolves from British Columbia, but last month the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, noting that there have been too many livestock killed by wolves, wrote a letter asking provincial officials to withhold those animals.

“The program has not been good for the wolves or the ranching community,” wrote Tim Ritschard, president of the Middle Park Stockgrowers on behalf of 26 farm and ranching organizations, adding that any wolves that killed livestock in Colorado would be shot or trapped. “Your deferral would benefit the wolves and avoid your becoming embroiled in this controversy.”

Incensed, wildlife advocates wrote their own letter, urging the province to resist the petition. “These calls are a direct affront to the decision made by Colorado’s voters, and to the spirit of cooperative conservation between our regions,” they wrote. “The livestock industry’s portrayal of this program as a ‘calamity’… grossly mischaracterizes the actual success of [the first phase of] wolf reintroduction efforts.”

Rural Coloradans resent the new program, said Erin Karney Spaur, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, because “all of the areas that are affected didn’t vote for this. They feel like it was done to them.”

Responding to concerns from Utah, officials in Colorado said that if any wolves from Colorado wandered into the neighboring state — where they would still enjoy federal protections — they would take them back. Steven Lund, a Utah state representative, asked during a legislative meeting, “Can we do that in the form of a rug?”

“I like the way you think,” responded Leann Hunting, an official with the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food.

Such views are common in Western states, where the topic of wolves is so emotional that the animal is treated like no other protected species, with both science and the law often taking a backseat to politics. For example: Wolves were listed as endangered in the Northern Rockies until 2011, when Montana Senator Jon Tester and Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, at the behest of the livestock and hunting industries, attached a rider to a must-pass defense bill that delisted them in those states. It was the first time Congress had directly removed an animal from the endangered species list for purely political reasons.

After the delisting, Montana and Idaho created wolf hunting seasons, but their initial, careful quotas have given way to widespread killing and much more liberal quotas spurred by anti-wolf sentiment. After maintaining a 10-year average population of about 1,000 wolves in Montana, last year hunters killed about a quarter of them. An individual hunter can take 20 wolves a year – 10 by trapping and 10 by shooting. In 2021, Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, made headlines after he hunted and killed a wolf wearing a tracking collar that had wandered out of Yellowstone National Park.

The desire to kill wolves has also given way to what some — including Ed Bangs, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist — consider a violation of the “fair chase” ethics of hunting. Wolves are being killed on private land by people with night vision and thermal imaging equipment. They are lured by bait and then shot, and both Montana and Idaho offer bounties for dead wolves — $2,000 in Idaho.

Hunters have killed large numbers of wolves around Yellowstone. Many wolves from the park, where no hunting is allowed, have little or no fear of humans and do not flee when they see hunters.

Montana “is managing them more aggressively than they need to,” said Bangs, who led the gray wolf recovery efforts in the 1990s. “That’s not the fish and game people, it’s the legislature doing that, somebody trying to prove they hate wolves more than the next guy.”

In Idaho, which has around 1,500 wolves, about 500 are killed each year. Officials there have said they want to reduce the total wolf population to 150 — the level below which federal protections would kick back in — and keep it there.

In most of Wyoming, wolves are classified as predators and can be shot on sight, year-round, with no limit.

Experts say the science is lacking on how many wolves can be killed while still maintaining healthy populations. “They don’t have the science to show what is an effective tool” for removing wolves, said Boyd, the wolf researcher, “and they don’t have a consistent method of estimating wolves. Wolves are hard to count.”

There is also an increase in unethical behavior around wolves, environmentalists say. In Montana, wolves are legally trapped with neck snares placed on trails. A wolf wanders into the metal loop and slowly chokes to death. Sometimes, grizzly bears, dogs, or other nontarget animals are accidentally killed. In Wyoming, snowmobile riders chase down and run over coyotes and wolves in a pastime called “yote mashing.”

In one instance a Wyoming man, Cody Roberts, brought a wolf that he had injured with a snowmobile into a bar in Daniel, Wyoming, with its mouth taped shut. He kissed and teased the leashed wolf and allowed it to be filmed before the animal was shot behind the bar. Roberts was fined $250.

Bangs says that wolf populations are resilient and will survive even if their numbers are diminished. “Unless you have an organized government strategy, like in the 1900s, of unlimited poisoning and shooting,” he said. “That way you can get rid of a wolf population, but it takes decades.” Such a program, he adds, “is never gonna happen.”

However, Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said wolves have to persist at a high enough level to play important ecological roles. Wolves help keep elk and deer populations down, which in turn helps other species, both plant and animal. “I have reasonable fears that their numbers would be so greatly diminished they would become functionally ecologically extinct,” Weiss said. “Wolves have a role to play in nature. You have to have enough wolves on the ground in order for them to play that role.”

Weiss and other advocates claim that the Fish and Wildlife Service has long fought full endangered species protections for the wolf largely because it is such a controversial topic. The agency recently challenged a 2022 federal court order that restored endangered protections outside the Northern Rockies, thus delaying a national wolf recovery plan.

Similar controversies are simmering in Europe, where thanks to EU policies enacted in 1979, the number of wolves has nearly doubled in the last decade to 20,300. Germany had one pack of wolves in 2000: Now it has 209.

That has led to more livestock being killed, and in 2023 wolves attacked and killed Dolly, a chestnut pony belonging to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, at her farm in Lower Saxony, Germany. A year after the killing, von der Leyen announced plans to reduce protections for wolves in Europe. Critics have accused her of pursuing retribution.

Some people are also fearful of attacks on children. There have been several recent attacks on children as well as adults by wolves in the Netherlands, though none fatal. A recent headline in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, read “The village in Holland terrorized by wild wolves: How attacks are exploding across Europe…”

In 2021, experts in Norway examined wolf attacks on humans globally between 2002 and 2020 and reported that the risks associated with such attacks “are above zero, but far too low to calculate.” They found 26 credible reports of wolf-caused human fatalities over those 18 years, 12 of them in Turkey.

The Council of Europe last week voted to downgrade the wolf from strictly protected to protected, which would allow wolves to be killed if they attack livestock. The change would offer “more flexibility in managing wolf populations,” von der Leyen said, because “we need a balanced approach between the preservation of wildlife and the protection of our livelihoods.”

The World Wildlife Fund condemned the downgrade. “Wolf populations have barely recovered after going extinct in most parts of Europe,” the organization said in a statement, “and weakening their protection could jeopardize this fragile recovery.”

Meanwhile, in Colorado, despite pushback from ranchers and some county officials, the state recently announced that it had secured 15 more wolves from British Columbia and that reintroduction efforts were on track. Said Jeff Davis, director of Colorado Parks and Wildlife, “We are confident we will be successful restoring a healthy, sustainable population of gray wolves to Colorado as mandated, while avoiding and minimizing impacts to our critical ranching industry and rural communities.”