Governor Tony Evers

Dear Governor Evers,

In late February, Wisconsin hound hunters and other trophy hunters and trappers, set loose by your Department of Natural Resources slaughter more than 200 wolves in about 48 hours.  This was double the kill limit that DNR set.

More than 90 percent of the hunters who made kills did so with the aid of dogs, keeping Wisconsin's unfortunate designation as the only state or province in North America that allows the use of dogs in hunting wolves.

This was an unconscionable, reckless, horribly regulated assault on the state's small population of wolves.  Perhaps 25 percent of the population was killed in a two-day period, undermining decades of work to bring wolves back to Wisconsin.

Wisconsin's Native American tribes also strongly opposed this slaughter.  The nation was shocked by this outrageous abuse of wolves.

Wolf populations in Wisconsin should remain protected and not hunted down in a rushed, ill-advised, and legally suspect trophy hunting season in your state.

As you are undoubtedly aware, the Trump administration scrambled in its waning months to end protections for endangered gray wolves in the United States. The Trump rulemaking was fundamentally flawed and is expected to be turned back by the courts. Similar flawed efforts had been turned back by the federal courts. It would be a dereliction of duty for the DNR to authorize more hunting of the wolves if the courts do not intercede and block the killing.

Americans have a long history with wolves. But for the salutary intervention through the application of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), in the form of a listing action for wolves in Minnesota in 1974, it's been an ugly history, characterized by a ruthless war against wolves driven by private citizens and public agents. Many states instituted bounties on wolves, incentivizing the killing in order to achieve extirpation. It worked. The slaughter of wolves stands alongside the massacre of bison as one of the saddest and most inhumane chapters in the history of American dealings with wildlife.

In recent decades, thanks mainly to some intermittent actions by the federal government, we've tried to undo some of the lasting damage to wolves–first in the 1970s by protecting the small population of surviving wolves in Minnesota through the ESA, and then in the last 20 years through reintroduction efforts in the Northern Rockies and the Southwest.

Wolves are an economic and ecological boon, promoting tourism, providing a check on prey populations, and strengthening the vigor of the ecosystems in which they live. They are not the rapacious species that their critics caricature. The depth of their misunderstanding of wolves is on par with their overly optimistic reading of their current state of population health. 

When Wisconsin last left wolf populations without protection, from 2012 to 2014, we hoped that would be the last sad chapter in the state's abuse of wolves.  What happeed at the end of February was shocking.  We hope you will turn around this situation and rein in a rogue DNR. 

We ask for your help in ensuring that this slaughter, by the methods your state permitted, never happens again. 

Sincerely,
 

Wayne Pacelle

Founder

Animal Wellness Action