Green Options

The gray wolf population in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Utah, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan has recovered enough since being listed as endangered in 1974 to be removed from the list of species that are threatened and endangered.

Secrectary of the Interior Ken Salazaar concurred with the January decison of the US Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the animal.

Warning: Video contains disturbing content.

This video is very hard to make out (and all online Turkish-to-English translations don’t yield much more insight), but this appears as if a small town in Turkey gathered together to encourage their dogs to attack and kill a captive wolf. Please comment if you have any idea what is going on.

Wolves need all the help they can get – climate change, hunters, agricultural communities campaigning for eradication and shrinking territories all threaten their continued existence. The dogs they bred with have already disappeared, and the wolves may still follow.

In one of his first moves upon taking office, President Obama has ordered a freeze on all new or pending regulations from the Bush administration.

Despite the news yesterday that the wolf population in Yellowstone has decreased 27%, the Bush administration said today that they will remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list in the Midwest and in the area surrounding Yellowstone National Park.

The Bush administration has tried to remove the wolves’ federal protections twice before, once in the Great Lakes and once in the northern Rockies, which includes Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. Federal judges revoked both rule changes in February and September of last year.

After completing its annual wolf population estimate, Yellowstone National Park has announced that the number of wolves inside the park has declined by 27% since the end of 2007. 124 wolves are now thought to reside in the park, down from 171. Is this a normal fluctuation?

Democratic Oklahoma state senator Earl Garrison has proposed a “Hunters Bill of Rights” that would guarantee the legality of hunting. He fears a ban on hunting could could happen at some point due to pressure from animal rights groups and hopes to preemptively block any attempts with a constitutional amendment.

“Animals have to be harvested,” he said. “It’s important that you have management because if you don’t, you get overpopulation, and the animals get smaller and there’s too much inbreeding.”

The Defenders of Wildlife, critical of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s record on the aerial killing of wolves, has expanded the viewing audience of its newest television ad just in time for Thursday’s vice-presidential debate.

Michael M. Phillips recently blogged for the Wall Street Journal about some bad press that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is receiving from environmental groups in the form of the above video:

“Soon after she took office, Palin proposed that the state provide a $150 ‘incentive’ for aerial wolf hunters; to collect it the hunters would have to turn in the animal’s severed left forepaw. Several environmental groups immediately attacked the proposal as an illegal ‘bounty’ and sued the state. The court

[...]

The Republican vice presidential nominee’s Alaskan administration has not only supported the aerial hunting of adult wolves, but also the slaughter of their pups.

Sarah Palin’s record is not very favorable for wildlife. She’s put efforts into undoing federal wildlife protections for polar bears and beluga whales in order to protect oil and gas drilling operations, for example. But her position on wolf hunting is perhaps the most controversial.

One of Palin’s first acts in office was to put a $150 bounty on the heads of her state’s wolves, allegedly with the goal of increasing the moose and caribou population. But this was no ordinary hunt - it was meant to incentivize the aerial killing of wolves, in which private hunters take a small plane and chase down wolf packs until they’re exhausted and can’t move any more, when they either shoot them from the air or land and execute them at point blank range. A Defenders of Wildlife ad illustrating this process is available at ClimateProgress.

A new study in the journal BMC Ecology indicates that coastal wolves in British Columbia switch to eating salmon in the fall as a primary food source, rather than deer. Scientists arrived at this conclusion after analyzing wolf poop they collected over a four year span.

Among the thousands of stools that were collected by the researchers in the spring and summer months, 90-95% of them contained some indications that wolves were eating deer as prey. In the fall, however, this number dropped significantly. About 40-70% of the stools in this time of year indicated that wolves were dining on salmon.

So what’s the big deal?