Most U.S. Wolves are listed as endangered-again. Here's why.

[Pantheraman]

"A U.S. District Court judge in Oakland, California, ruled on February 10 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acted improperly in delisting wolves. That decision, which went into effect in October 2020 toward the end of the Trump Administration, removed federal protections for the animals, arguing they had recovered within substantial parts of their range. This delisting decision has been upheld—and defended in court—by the Biden Administration."

"It’s a good day for science, for wolves, for ecosystems, and for the people who value wolves,” says Adrian Treves, a wolf researcher and professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin."

"For instance, the court decision means that most forms of wolf-killing, such as hunting or trapping, will be illegal outside the Northern Rockies. This is most relevant for the Great Lakes states, including Wisconsin, which authorized a controversial wolf hunt in February 2021 that killed 218 wolves in under three days.

But owing to previous legislation that wasn’t at issue in the current lawsuit, the ruling does not apply to wolves in the Northern Rockies, which includes Idaho, Montana, most of Wyoming, as well as parts of eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and northern Utah. Those animals will continue to be managed by the states and not the federal government. Moreover, in 2021, Idaho and Montana enacted laws to remove most restrictions on wolf hunting. Well over 500 wolves have been killed in these states alone since last spring, out of a total population of around 2,600, according to government figures. That’s just the official tally—the likely death toll is higher."

Most U.S. wolves are listed as endangered—again. Here’s why.

 

[birdsandbats]

It’s just stop Wisconsin from hunting them again.

 

[Pantheraman]

And already the hunting community, the main driving force behind wolf delisting, is complaining.

Course, what do you expect? For a moment, let's examine their claim that if predators are "uncontrolled" by hunting the predators will decimate or even kill off all their prey.

When one looks at how predator-prey dynamics work, we can already see that this idea is very flawed.

1. Many predators fail more often than they succeed. Tigers succeed only 10% of the time, leopards at 38%, and wolves when hunting elk succeed 5-15% of the time. Since they fail more than they succeed, how on earth are they supposed to decimate a large prey population? True, some predators are the opposite, like the cheetah which succeeds 58% of the time, but you have to remember that many predators with higher success rates happen to be subordinate predators in a system that are controlled by more dominant predators.

2. Now to get into why this is the case. Predators have strengths and weaknesses. Tigers are strong, stealthy, fast, and good swimmers. But they don't have much stamina and they're less effective out in the open. Painted dogs are endurance runners and are very effective on open plains, but they become much less effective in more wooded areas, which is where most of them live. Prey animals, (and this is something the hunting community seems to ignore when talking about predation) have natural defenses against predators: sharp senses, social behavior, camouflage, horns, antlers, hooves, speed, stamina, swimming, using landscapes to avoid being hunted, etc. Even a white-tailed deer isn't totally defenseless. They're fast, have sharp hooves, and when birthing, the does try giving birth at around the same time so if a predator eats one fawn, it's full and the rest of the fawns have a higher chance of getting to the point where they can flee from predators. This is nature's evolutionary arms race, predators get better at catching prey while prey get better at escaping them.

3. Here's how the population dyamics work: predator and prey populations reach equilibrium and the predators naturally fluctuate with the prey. If a deer population goes down, for example, the wolf population goes down (something the Minnesota game agency has confirmed. The prey numbers go down due to fewer food resources caused by the weather. So it's not the predators that should be blamed, but the weather.