ABQjournal: Catron Commission Fires Shot at Wolf Protection By Michael J. Robinson, Center for Biological Diversity

The Catron County commission recently approved an ordinance authorizing a county contractor to kill endangered Mexican gray wolves, contrary to the federal Endangered Species Act and the 1998 regulations that delineate what is legal in the reintroduction program that began that year. The ordinance is the latest chapter in a century-long effort by the livestock industry to create private rights on America’s public lands. …

The Fish and Wildlife Service, which for decades poisoned and trapped wolves on behalf of the livestock industry, and is now charged with enforcing the Endangered Species Act, similarly bends to the livestock industry. The agency authorizes trapping and shooting of endangered Mexican wolves today even as the population fails to meet initial thresholds for recovery. But Catron County’s ranchers want zero wolves. In 2005, at a now-defunct Governor’s Wolf Task Force meeting in Catron County, ranchers proffered a series of what they called “non-negotiable points,” including that all the wild wolves be rounded up and kept in a fenced enclosure. The ranchers also categorically rejected a New Mexico Department of Agriculture proposal that would have significantly increased their payments for wolf depredations while ending the current requirement that dead livestock be verified as wolf kills, or considered possible wolf kills, prior to payments. …

The refusal to compromise has been successful. …

The federal government has so far, since reintroduction began, shot 10 wild Mexican wolves, consigned 24 to life in captivity, killed 20 inadvertently incidental to capture, and released dozens of wolves it had captured— many of them traumatized and some of them injured— in areas far from their familiar home territories. Although the government originally projected 18 breeding pairs by the end of 2006, there are now only five breeding pairs left from last year.

Catron County’s threat to kill wolves on its own is an attempt to ratchet up the killing by either federal or private parties, or both. The goal is once again extermination, but it is also more ambitious than that. Livestock owners seek to ensure that they alone, and not the American public through their elected members of Congress, will determine what animals roam the public lands and how those lands are managed. So far, unfortunately, neither the Fish and Wildlife Service nor the Justice Department have indicated they will stand up for the wolves, the rule of law, and the American public.