Contacts:
Bethany Cotton, Conservation Director, Cascadia Wildlands, (541) 434-1463
Samantha Bruegger, Wildlife Coexistence Campaigner, WildEarth Guardians

Outrage: Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife Kills Wolf Puppies

Agency Guns Down Two 3.5 Month Old Wolf Pups from Helicopter Using Public Tax Dollars

Baker County, OR — The Oregon Wildlife Coalition, an alliance of nine wildlife conservation organizations, has learned that the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife (ODFW) needlessly slaughtered two 3 ½ month-old wolf pups from the Lookout Mountain pack by helicopter over the weekend. As allowed by ODFW’s weakened wolf conservation and management plan, the pups were killed to appease the livestock industry, making it clear that Oregon aligns its wolf management with states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska. The killing of defenseless pups underscores how the removal of federal wolf protections allows state agencies hostile to wolf recovery to undermine the decades long species’ recovery efforts. Pups this age are entirely dependent on the older wolves in their packs to bring back food: they do not participate in hunts.

Killing baby wolves, that are far too young to hunt, is as inhumane and as it is unscientific. ODFW has not notified the public of this decision, however the agency did provide comments on the killing to the agricultural publication The Capital Press.

The Oregon Fish & Wildlife Commission is the managing body for the Department, and accountable for the department’s decision, as is Oregon Governor Kate Brown. Commissioners are appointed by the Governor, and future Commission appointments are critical to determining the future of wildlife management decisions. It is also clear, that the state continues to allocate a substantial amount of public funding under “predator control” in its budget; this needs to change.

The Oregon Wildlife Coalition, representing hundreds of thousands of Oregonians, calls on ODFW to immediately cancel the kill permit for the Lookout Mountain pack and on Governor Brown and her Commission to initiate an investigation into how authorization was granted to kill baby wolves incapable of livestock predation.

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The Oregon Wildlife Coalition is a coalition of wildlife conservation groups working proactively and collaboratively to advocate for policies that are science-based and humane, and reflect the state’s conservation values.

The post Press Release: ODFW Uses Tax Dollars to Kill 3.5 Month Old Wolf Pups first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Lawsuit Challenges Washington Wolf-killing Protocol

Injunction Sought Against Further Killings After State Nearly Wipes Out Three Packs for One Livestock Owner

OLYMPIA, Wash.— Two conservation groups filed a lawsuit today seeking to stop the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and its director, James Unsworth, from killing any more state-endangered wolves.

Today’s suit, filed on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity and Cascadia Wildlands, asserts that the agency’s killing of wolves from the Smackout and Sherman packs in northeastern Washington relied upon a faulty protocol and failed to undergo required environmental analysis. The suit was filed in Superior Court of Washington for Thurston County.

“We can’t sit by and watch Washington wildlife officials kill more wolves from the state’s small and recovering wolf population,” said Amaroq Weiss, the Center’s West Coast wolf advocate. “Washingtonians overwhelmingly want wolves recovered, not killed. The Department of Fish and Wildlife needs to listen to public opinion and consider the dire environmental costs of killing more wolves.”

In June of this year, Fish and Wildlife officials adopted a revised “wolf-livestock interaction protocol” for determining when to kill wolves in response to livestock conflicts. The protocol provided for the state to kill wolves more quickly than in prior years. As the lawsuit notes, the protocol was adopted without any public input or environmental review, in violation of the state’s Environmental Policy and Administrative Procedure Acts.

“Reasonable minds can differ on when we should and should not be killing wolves, and whether the killing of the wolves in these two packs was justified,” said Nick Cady, legal director for Cascadia Wildlands. “But there is no question that we should be fully analyzing the efficacy of these actions, welcoming public and scientific input, and be able to hold the state accountable. This is a state agency spending taxpayer dollars.”

The department has since relied on the protocol to order killing of wolves from two packs, with two wolves from the Smackout pack and one wolf from the Sherman pack killed to date. At the time of the Sherman pack kill order, only two wolves could be confirmed as comprising the pack, one of which the department has now killed. The department has temporarily paused killing wolves from both packs, but will resume if there are more livestock losses.

Overall, since 2012, the state has killed 18 state-endangered wolves, nearly 16 percent of the state’s current confirmed population of 115 wolves. Fifteen of the wolves killed since 2012 were killed on behalf of the same livestock owner; those kills have now led to the near eradication of three entire wolf packs, including the Profanity Peak pack last year, and the Wedge pack in 2012. The rancher in question has been a vocal opponent of wolf recovery and has historically refused to implement meaningful nonlethal measures designed to protect his livestock from wolves.

Washington’s wolves were driven to extinction in the early 1900s by a government-sponsored eradication program on behalf of the livestock industry. The animals began to return from neighboring Idaho and British Columbia in the early 2000s, and their population has grown to 20 confirmed packs as of the end of 2016.

But wolf recovery in Washington is still a work in progress. Wolves remain absent from large areas of the state and although the population has been growing, it remains small and vulnerable. Given the continued endangered status of wolves, the state and livestock operators should stick to nonlethal methods as the sole means for reducing loss of livestock to wolves.

“We appreciate that many livestock owners already are using nonlethal methods, said Weiss, “since the science shows such methods are more effective anyway.”

Plaintiffs are represented in the case by attorneys from the law firm Lane Powell.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.5 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. Recognizing the ecological importance of wolves, bears and other carnivores, the Center uses science-based advocacy to defend these magnificent animals from persecution, exploitation and extinction. Find out more about our Carnivore Conservation campaign here.

Cascadia Wildlands educates, agitates, and inspires a movement to protect and restore Cascadia’s wild ecosystems. We envision vast old-growth forests, rivers full of wild salmon, wolves howling in the backcountry, and vibrant communities sustained by the unique landscapes of the Cascadia bioregion.

The post Cascadia Lawsuit Challenges Wolf Killing in Washington! first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Contact:
Nick Cady, Cascadia Wildlands, nick@old.cascwild.org, (314) 482-3746

Oregon Killing Wolves Again in Imnaha Pack Territory

Harl Butte Pack Targeted in Response to Depredations on Forest Service Lands

Today, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife signed a kill order for the Harl Butte  Pack in Northeastern Oregon.  The Harl Butte Pack territory largely overlaps with the former territory of the Imnaha Pack which was killed last year by the Department.  The kill order comes in response to two recent conflicts with cows on public National Forests, where one calf was confirmed killed by wolves. 

“Cascadia Wildlands is disgusted that the Department is moving to kill wolves again in the Imnaha pack territory,” said Nick Cady with Cascadia Wildlands. “It is becoming painfully obvious from every experience in Oregon and Washington that killing wolves leads to more conflict down the line and does not address the problem.  We are setting ourselves up for a perpetual cycle where we are throwing away public dollars and needlessly killing a still-recovering species.”

The Department is operating under a wolf plan last updated in 2010.  The Department is obligated to update its plan every five years, but delayed this update to push forward the removal of wolves from the state list of endangered species.  This delisting decision is currently being litigated and was heavily criticized by Oregonians and the scientific community. 

“The Department is killing wolves under an outdated wolf plan, the revision of which is approaching three years overdue.  The Department has released a draft of this plan with a science update that calls into serious question the efficacy of killing wolves to prevent conflicts with livestock.  It is ridiculous that the Department is prioritizing killing wolves prior to finalizing a sound management policy.”

The request for the kill order came from Oregon’s livestock industry, which has recently argued in court that wolves are an invasive species.  The recent wolf-livestock conflicts occurred on public Forest Service lands, where grazing is heavily subsidized by the federal government.

“This kill order is wrong and simply another aimless gift to the commercial livestock industry already bloated on public subsidies.  There are just over a hundred wolves confirmed in Oregon, and population growth this past year was stagnant.  The mission of the Department of Fish and Wildlife is to protect recovering native species, not to meaninglessly pander to large commercial industries pushing for wolf eradication.”

The kill order can be found here.

The post Oregon Killing Harl Butte Wolf Pack first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
600 Capitol Way North, Olympia, WA 98501-1091
http://wdfw.wa.gov/

Contact:
Donny Martorello, (360) 902-2521

WDFW plans to take lethal action to change wolf pack’s behavior

OLYMPIA – State wildlife managers plan to remove members of a wolf pack that has repeatedly preyed on livestock in Stevens County since 2015.

Jim Unsworth, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) authorized his staff to take lethal action against the Smackout wolf pack, based on four occasions where wolves preyed on livestock since last September.

Unsworth said that action, set to begin this week, is consistent with Washington’s Wolf Management Plan of 2011, which authorizes WDFW to take lethal measures to address repeated attacks on livestock.

It is also consistent with the department’s policy that allows removing wolves if they prey on livestock three times in a 30-day period or four times in a 10-month period, said Donny Martorello, WDFW’s lead wolf manager.

That policy was developed last year by WDFW and its 18-member Wolf Advisory Group, which represents the concerns of environmentalists, hunters, and livestock ranchers.

“The purpose of this action is to change the pack’s behavior, while also meeting the state’s wolf-conservation goals,” Martorello said. “That means incrementally removing wolves and assessing the results before taking any further action.”

The Smackout pack is one of 20 wolf packs documented in Washington state by WDFW in 2016. At that time, the pack was estimated to consist of eight wolves, but it has since produced an unknown number of pups.

Martorello noted that the state’s wolf population is growing at a rate of about 30 percent each year.

The pack’s latest depredation on livestock was discovered July 18 by an employee of the livestock owner who found an injured calf with bite marks consistent with a wolf attack in a leased federal grazing area.

During the previous month, the rancher reported to WDFW that his employee had caught two wolves in the act of attacking livestock and killed one of them. The department has since determined that those actions were consistent with state law, which allows livestock owners and their employees to take lethal action to protect their livestock in areas of the state where wolves are no longer listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Over the past two months, radio signals from GPS collars attached to two of the pack’s members have indicated that those wolves were frequently within a mile of that site during the previous two months, Martorello said.

“This rancher has made concerted efforts to protect his livestock using non-lethal measures,” Martorello said. “Our goal is to change the pack’s behavior before the situation gets worse.

Since 2015, WDFW has documented that wolves have killed three calves and injured three others in the same area of Stevens County.

Gray wolves are classified as “endangered” under Washington state law, but are no longer protected in the eastern third of the state under the federal Endangered Species Act. The state’s wolf plan sets population recovery objectives and outlines methods for minimizing wolf-livestock conflicts

For more information on WDFW’s action, see Update on Washington Wolves at http://wdfw.wa.gov/conservation/gray_wolf/.

WDFW’s Wolf-Livestock Interaction Protocol is available at http://wdfw.wa.gov/conservation/gray_wolf/livestock/action_criteria.html.

Persons with disabilities who need to receive this information in an alternative format or who need reasonable accommodations to participate in WDFW-sponsored public meetings or other activities may contact Dolores Noyes by phone (360-902-2349), TTY (360-902-2207), or email (dolores.noyes@dfw.wa.gov). For more information, see http://wdfw.wa.gov/accessibility/reasonable_request.html.

The post Washington to Kill Wolves first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

The post State of Washington Urged to Halt Wolf Killing: Evidence Lacking That Wedge Wolf Pack Is Responsible for Livestock Loss first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.