Well, I knew Ken Salazar was a mistake for Interior Secretary, because as a rancher, he's been more like a republican than a democrat. That mistake is confirmed in yesterday's alert from Defenders of Wildlife.
Today, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that he would follow the discredited path of the Bush Administration and delist wolves in the Northern Rockies and Greater Yellowstone region.
This is a stunning development, just six weeks into the Obama Administration. This delisting paves the way for almost 1000 wolves to be killed under deadly state management plans in Idaho and Montana.
According to MSNBC, Salazar said a review of the January decision found that scientists support the conclusion that gray wolf populations in the northern Rockies and Western Great Lakes are healthy.
"The recovery of the gray wolf throughout significant portions of its historic range is one of the great success stories of the Endangered Species Act," Salazar said in a statement. "When it was listed as endangered in 1974, the wolf had almost disappeared from the continental United States. Today, we have more than 5,500 wolves, including more than 1,600 in the Rockies."
Defenders of Wildlife was quick to fire back.
"Today is a truly disappointing day," Defenders of Wildlife President Rodger Schlickeisen said in a statement. "Defenders of Wildlife will now move to sue Secretary Salazar as quickly as possible."
"All the reasons why this plan was a bad idea when the Bush administration proposed it still stand today," Schlickeisen said. "If this rule is allowed to stand, nearly two-thirds of the wolves in the Northern Rockies could be killed."
And as the lines form for hunting tags, Idaho Governor C.L. Butch Otter "repeated his desire to get the first available wolf hunting tag in the state so he can try to shoot one of the animals."
"The fish and game population is really counting on a robust population of trophy animals to maintain that part of our economy," he said.
This is the kind of shenanigans I expected from the Bush administration, but I was hopeful that Obama's administrion would be animal friendly.
Not with Ken Salazar.