Friends of Animals in Wolf Litigation Alliance to Halt Mass Shootings in Wyoming

The state of Wyoming wants unregulated wolf killing in more than 80 percent of the state. So Friends of Animals just joined WildEarth Guardians and several other allies, including Duane Short of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance in Wyoming, to go to court once again for wolves. The federal decision to prematurely rescind Endangered Species Act protection for Wyoming’s wolves throws these animals back to the era when they were shot on sight in the west, as part of a deliberate extermination campaign.

Outside of Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming would do away with most of the wolves. The full effects would be even harsher, as killing breaks up families, and the death of parents always leaves young wolves disoriented, and often abandoned to starve.

Wyoming ’s wolf plan was written in part to appease animal farmers, and in part to please the hunting lobby. Wolves kill less than one percent of cattle and sheep in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. And with 104,000 elk in Wyoming, 330 wolves are hardly eating many of them either. Even if they were, what of it? Wolves need meat to survive. We do not.

As top carnivores, the presence of wolves in ecosystems creates greater biological diversity, affecting species ranging from beetles to songbirds to grizzly bears.

“The Wyoming plan is not good for wolves, for the environment, or millions of taxpayers who want to restore more wolves to the landscape,” said Denise Boggs of our Montana-based co-plaintiff, the Conservation Congress.

Our members stand with those millions, knowing it makes no scientific or ethical sense to subject even a fully recovered wolf population to a trigger-happy firing squad.