Around 35 red wolves live in the wild. All are located on a peninsula in North Carolina. On Wednesday, Trump’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offered up a new plan that would allow surrounding farmers the right to kill the wolves if they strayed onto their land. This would end three decades of work by conservationists to save the species that once roamed across our country.
Leopoldo Miranda is the assistant director for ecological services and tells the Washington Post that the new plan is to try to keep 10 to 15 wolves at the refuge and find them a new “more friendly and suitable” habitat.
“Success for me right now is to keep this smaller wild population as intact as possible,” Miranda said. It will take hard work, outreach with state officials and conservation groups dedicated to saving red wolves, and research that can guide government officials to more supportive habitat.
The red wolf has disappeared through hunting (by mistake, at times) and through interspecies breeding with coyotes. Over the past few years, locals have pushed back very hard on the reintroduction of the red wolf, with support from their more conservative officials. But the plan, according to conservationists, is a death sentence for the wolf.
The move has prompted fierce backlash. “If you can’t succeed in North Carolina, what makes them think they are going to succeed elsewhere?” says Joseph Hinton, a researcher at the University of Georgia who has worked alongside Chamberlain. “You think this animal is going to do any better in east Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama?”
They argue that any reintroduction of animals and healthy growth of those populations requires a “wild” component, and the administration’s idea of maintaining a population of 10 to 15 wolves for some indeterminate amount of time is “ludicrous.” Others, like attorney Ramona McGee from the Southern Environmental Law Center, have sued in order to force the courts to force an injunction on the application of this plan.
“The court has all the information it needs,” McGee said. She called the service’s recent management of red wolves “an egregious violation of the Endangered Species Act” and said the “injunction remains in place until the Fish and Wildlife Service goes to the court and asks to have it removed.”
According to the National Wildlife Federation, red wolves “mate for life.” I guess we know why all of these “moral majority” types can’t stand them, when they just rub their fidelity in conservative faces.