NEWSFLASH

SAVING THE MEXICAN GRAY WOLF

The smallest gray wolf subspecies in North America, the Mexican gray wolf is also one of the rarest and most endangered mammals on the continent. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (and its predecessor agency) poisoned and trapped almost all Mexican wolves from the wild from 1915 until 1973; the last five survivors, captured between 1977 and 1980, were bred in captivity and their progeny reintroduced in 1998. At the end of 2008, only two Mexican wolf breeding pairs remained in the wild.

The Center has worked continuously to reintroduce the Mexican wolf to the wild and to provide it with protection from government and private persecution, beginning with a 1990 court case that led to the wolf’s eventual reintroduction. Along the way, we’ve helped defeat two livestock-industry lawsuits that sought to compel the government to trap or kill all the Mexican wolves from the wild, and we helped defeat a bill in the House of Representatives that would have terminated the reintroduction program. Our advocacy induced the government to re-release trapped wolves into the Gila National Forest, and our 2006 lawsuit led to an ongoing process to reform management of the wolf program so more wolves are left in the wild. 

Thanks to Center litigation, in 2009 the Fish and Wildlife Service threw out a policy called SOP 13 that required the removal of any wolf believed to have killed livestock three times in a year; the Service also reclaimed authority over wolf management, which it had previously delegated to a group hostile to recovery and largely made up of government agencies dominated by the livestock industry. The same year, we petitioned to protect the Mexican gray wolf separately from other U.S. gray wolves, as an endangered subspecies or a “distinct population segment” — which would compel the development of an updated federal recovery plan, including a long-term plan for establishing new populations. Through our work, we’ve educated thousands of people about the crucial ecological role of wolves and rallied the public to oppose the policies leading to ongoing government shooting and trapping of Mexican wolves.