Feds aim to work around wolf ruling.

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Feds aim to work around wolf ruling.

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Federal agency seeks to remove gray wolf from protected list

RON SEELY
608-252-6131
rseely@madison.com

An official with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said the agency is looking for other ways to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list in the wake of a September court decision that returned the animal to protected status.

Delisting the wolf would give states such as Wisconsin more alternatives for dealing with problem animals in the resurgent population, though opponents such as the Humane Society of the United States oppose delisting because less protection could threaten recovery efforts and open the way to hunting.

Laura Ragan, the regional listing coordinator for the wildlife service in Minneapolis, said the deadline for appealing the federal court decision has passed, so an appeal, which Wisconsin wildlife officials had hoped to see, is no longer an option.

But she said the agency is now considering, among other things, publishing a new delisting rule that would address concerns raised in the lawsuit and allow the agency to remove the wolf from protected status.

The court ruling that placed the wolf back into protected status said the federal government failed to follow the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. The court said the government treated the Great Lakes gray wolves as a distinct population, separate from other wolf populations in the East and West, when it removed the animals from the list.

"Our Washington officials are still looking at all of our potential options," Ragan said.

Wisconsin wildlife officials are anxiously awaiting the federal agency's actions. They fear their inability to control problem wolves may be translating into growing sentiment against the animals and recovery efforts.

In a related development, the state Department of Natural Resources said last week that seven gray wolves were killed during the recent hunting season. Adrian Wydeven, a conservation biologist who oversees the state's wolf recovery efforts, said some of those wolves may have been killed deliberately and that the deaths are being investigated.

"We're seeing more of a growth in negative attitudes toward wolves,'' Wydeven said.

The gray wolf nearly disappeared from Wisconsin by the 1950s, mostly due to trapping and bounties. But federal and state protection and a DNR recovery program that protected habitat brought wolves loping back into Wisconsin from Minnesota. Now there are more than 600 wolves living in 138 packs throughout northern and central Wisconsin.

So successful was the comeback that in March 2007, the government removed the wolf in Great Lakes states from the endangered species list. Wisconsin wildlife officials welcomed the delisting because it allowed them to kill wolves that were preying on livestock or causing other problems. The agency was even able to issue special permits to some landowners, allowing them to kill problem wolves. While the wolf was delisted, 38 of the permits were issued and 45 problem wolves were killed.

That all changed in September when a federal judge ruled in favor of the humane society, which had challenged the government's decision to delist the wolf. One of the main issues cited by the judge was that the government didn't properly follow the provisions of the Endangered Species Act when it dealt with the approximate 4,000 wolves in Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota as a separate and distinct population from gray wolves in other regions.

The main impact in Wisconsin was that the state had to resort to less effective means of deterring wolf predation on livestock. Wydeven said that rather than killing wolves that prey on livestock the agency has been using devices designed to scare wolves away from farms, such as flashing lights and flagging material.

Wydeven said the DNR is also planning to apply for a permit from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that would allow the agency to contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to kill wolves that are attacking livestock, though that alternative would not provide as much flexibility as delisting. Ragan said the USFWS is willing to consider issuing such permits.

"We have issued the permits to Michigan and Wisconsin in the past," Ragan said. "That is certainly something we'd entertain."

But Wydeven and others said a bigger underlying problem may be growing sentiment against wolves, spurred by the growing and spreading wolf population, the lack of means to control problem animals, and attacks on farm animals and hunting dogs. During the bear hunting season in the fall, Wydeven said, wolves killed 21 hunting dogs, a near record number eclipsed only in 2006 when 25 dogs were killed. The DNR compensates hunters for dogs killed by wolves.

Adrian Treves, a UW-Madison researcher who studies public attitudes toward wolves and other large predators, said that while some animal rights groups oppose the DNR's move toward lethal control of wolves, surveys have shown that a majority of people in Wisconsin actually favor a wolf hunting season if science shows no damage to the overall population.

But Treves said he plans to conduct new surveys that will get at any possible changes in attitudes were the wolf to be delisted and then classified as a game animal in the state. The implications are considerable, he added, because the DNR counts on money to support wolf programs both from the sale of wolf license plates and a tax checkoff program that lets people contribute to recovery efforts by marking a box on their state tax forms.

Wydeven said that as the wolf populations grows and spreads south into new territories, attitudes against wolves may become more negative if the agency can't offer effective ways to control problem animals.

"In the areas where wolves are living, there still seems to be a strong element of people being against the wolves," Wydeven said. "That's always been the biggest challenge, having people accept wolves where they are living."
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