*Editor’s Note* – Below is a copy of a press release, I am told, from the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), about information obtained through FOIA. Also, at the end of the press release is a link to the FOIA-obtained information available to read should you choose.
What angers me most about this utter nonsense by the CBD is their attempt at always having their bread buttered on both sides. The real conservationists of this country, the hunters, have for many years now been trying to get state fish and game departments, as well as federal wildlife agencies, to manage wildlife based on science and not on social demands and political pressure. I dare say that one of the major reasons that these agencies now operate in the manner that it does is because of efforts from environmental groups like CBD.
In this case, CBD is whining and complaining because they feel that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), in their proposal to delist wolves in all the 48 lower states, made their decision based on, “‘what can the public tolerate’ and ‘where should wolves exist’ rather than where suitable habitat for wolves exists or what is scientifically necessary for recovery.”
While the CBD whines and complains, demanding the USFWS and other state wildlife departments use the CBD’s best available propagandized and fabricated science, they and other environmental and animal rights groups continue their efforts to infiltrate all of these same agencies in order to manipulate them into making wildlife management decisions based on “what the public can tolerate” and “where wolves should exist” instead of actual best available science.
You see, groups like the CBD demand agencies like USFWS to accept CBD’s “science” in their decision making processes when it is expedient and in the best interest of CBD and at the same time demand USFWS and other wildlife management agencies to accept CBD’s philosophies of managing wildlife based on social demands and all other political and non scientific agendas, when it is expedient and in the best interest of CBD.
When agencies such as CBD show such two-faced, hypocritical, unprofessional and unscientific nonsense, how can anyone take what they have to say in any serious way. They are nothing more than an activist, fundraising, fringe group wanting to have everything both ways.
For Immediate Release, June 27, 2013
Contact: Brett Hartl, (202) 817-8121
Documents Reveal State Officials, Not Scientists, Led Decision to Strip Endangered Species
Protections From Wolves Across Country
Endangered Species Act’s Science-based Mandate Sidestepped for Political Expediency
WASHINGTON— Documents obtained from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show last month’s proposal to remove most federal protections for gray wolves was preordained three years ago in a series of meetings with state wildlife agencies.
Under the Endangered Species Act, decisions to list and delist species must be made solely on the basis of the best available science. In this case the newly obtained documents suggest the Service pushed ahead to delist wolves without scientific support in order to obtain a political outcome desired by state fish and game agencies.
Specifically, the documents show that the Fish and Wildlife Service constrained the possible geographic scope of wolf recovery based on perceptions of “what can the public tolerate” and “where should wolves exist” rather than where suitable habitat for wolves exists or what is scientifically necessary for recovery. The meetings left state agencies in a position to dictate the fate of gray wolves across most of the lower 48 states.
“This process made a mockery of the spirit of the Endangered Species Act. These documents show that years ago the Fish and Wildlife Service effectively handed over the reins on wolf recovery to state fish and game agencies, many of which are openly hostile to wolves,” said Brett Hartl, endangered species policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “In order to ensure this politically contrived outcome, the Fish and Wildlife Service has spent the past three years cherry-picking scientific research that justifies the predetermined outcome that wolves don’t need protection anymore.”
In August 2010 officials from a select group of state fish and game agencies were invited to a week-long workshop at the Fish and Wildlife training center in West Virginia to effectively decide the future of gray wolf recovery in the United States. The decisions made at the meeting were largely adopted in the agency’s June 2013 proposal to end federal protections for gray wolves across most of the lower 48.
As part of this process, the Fish and Wildlife Service also excluded any consideration of further protection for wolves in Colorado and Utah for either gray wolves coming from the north or Mexican wolves coming from the south. This was based solely on the opposition of the two states’ wildlife agencies and despite extensive wolf habitat in the two states. The documents also show that Fish and Wildlife promised that the input of state wildlife agencies “with a cooperative management role” would be given greater weight in any future decision-making and that it would develop a wolf delisting rule to “implement [the] understanding” reached at the 2010 meeting.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service’s actions demonstrate a near total lack of transparency and scientific integrity,” said Hartl. “If the Service had followed this same logic 20 years ago, there would be no wolves in Yellowstone National Park today — and no wolves roaming across the northern Rocky Mountains. The Service needs to go back to the drawing board and let the scientific facts guide how to recover wolves across the millions of acres of suitable wolf habitat remaining in the western United States and the Northeast.”
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 500,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
