Draft plan would eliminate most of Idaho’s wolves. Here’s what you can do to stop it | Opinion

If you value wolves in Idaho, it will be important to provide input for the state’s forthcoming draft wolf management plan.

Because if it goes through as written, the majority of Idaho’s wolf population will be purposefully eliminated.

Under the proposed plan, unveiled at a meeting of the Idaho Fish and Game Commission late last month, the state would move quickly to reduce the number of wolves to around 500. In many years, there are upward of 1,500 wolves in Idaho.

That is a miracle.

Past generations of Americans were unwilling to deal with wolves killing a portion of livestock. So wolves were wiped out — poisoned, trapped and hunted until they had been extirpated from all of America, with the exception of Alaska and a small slice of Minnesota. Nearly a million years of history, where wolves roamed the vast majority of America, came to a sad, abrupt end.

But in the 1990s, an effort began to atone for our misdeeds. Wolves were reintroduced to a few select ecosystems, including in Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho. With careful protection, they’ve thrived and strengthened the ecosystems where they returned.

With wolves returned some of the things that caused them to be hunted in the first place, though: livestock predation and competition with human hunters. Those harms are real, but there are systems in place to deal with them.

Between July and November 2021, for example, there were 65 confirmed wolf depredations of livestock. The state provides funds to compensate ranchers who lose livestock and to take proactive measures to avoid wolf predation.

And Idaho’s deer and elk populations remain robust, the department reported at the same meeting. The main factor influencing their survival isn’t wolves or hunting, but how many calves survive the winter.

Given all that, it seems clear that moving this quickly to reduce the number of wolves so drastically is misguided.

Given our history — a history in which we killed every last wolf in Idaho — shouldn’t we err on the side of caution?

Members of the Fish and Game Commission said at the meeting that it is not the goal that the wolf be put back in danger of extinction or killed off to minimal levels. Commissioners maintain that wolves are overpopulated and that numbers need to be reduced to make the population sustainable.

But this reasoning does not seem well-founded.

The figure of 500 wolves comes from a rule proposed to delist the wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains in 2009. But a federal court found that this delisting plan violated the Endangered Species Act — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had tried to bend the law by counting a northern Rocky segment of wolves apart from wolves as a whole in order to delist them, but the law doesn’t allow this.

Shouldn’t the fact that Idaho has consistently maintained a wolf population of around 1,500 for several years — years where elk and deer populations remained high as well — be considered evidence that we can sustain a number substantially higher than 500?

It’s worth moving slowly and carefully. And our objectives shouldn’t be limited to ensuring that the wolf isn’t extirpated again.

The wolf should be allowed to thrive because it is a beautiful part of nature. It was here in Idaho long before we were, before cattle and sheep were. It hunted deer and elk long before humans did. It belongs to Idaho’s natural heritage. It is a thing of wonder.

It’s been a long, hard struggle to repair the sins of our past. Let’s take care not to repeat them.

Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, and newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser.