HOWL vs Home
Do you want wolves in your back or font yards where your kids or grand kids play???
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has two proposals open for comment. One to delist all wolves EXECPT the Mexican Wolf. The other is to change the release boundaries and other things in the 10J rule which runs the Mexican wolf program now. FWS has proposed everything south of I-40 as suitable habitat and Defenders of Wildlife have proposed Suitable Wolf Habitat and Potential Dispersal Corridors in the Southwest that include ALL of New Mexico, including Northern New Mexico. You must submit comments to BOTH FWS proposals to have your voice heard.
Join us for our Mexican Wolf Comment and Letter Campaign
When: December 16, 2013
Where: Cuba NRCS Office
44 County Road 11 Ste 4a
Cuba, New Mexico
Time: 5:00pm – 8:00pm
Your Voice Needs To Be Heard
DO YOU WANT WOLVES IN YOUR YARD???
Talking Points!
Management and rule planning.
NO private landowner agreements due to surrounding livestock producer and private property impacts.
Do not remove the rule that allows defense of livestock on deeded land. Instead add defense of stock dogs and hunting dogs on federally administered land. Protecting rural livelihoods is not likely to further endanger the species and keeping economic stability on the land is far more important than the miniscule number of wolves that could potentially be killed in the act of harming private property.
Private property (pets, livestock and other privately owned animals)deserve protection from wolves and the owners should never have their rights to protect them restricted or denied over this animal. They are not in danger of extinction as some have claimed.
No permit should ever be required for a property owner to protect livestock regardless of the location of that livestock. Discriminating against allotment owners by disallowing them to defend their livestock from attack, is not ethical and is arbitrary and capricious whether on deeded land or a federally administered grazing allotment where the owner has surface property rights and rights of way. Location does not change the designation of private property.
State lands should not gain the same management status as federally owned land. States must decide that issue not this program.
Replacing the term depredation incident was done by default of a policy change several years ago, it should be defined as one animal not multiple animals in a 24 hour period. The change was arbitrary and capricious then and it is arbitrary and capricious as a rule change as well.
Stop using the term Extinction in the wild, it was coined by wolf advocates and isn’t relevant to this program. Extinction only means the state or situation that results when something (such as a plant or animal species) has died out completely. It isn’t subject to location or whether or not an animal is or isn’t in all corners of the historic habitat. It is spin until or if the captive breeding animals all die, and the wild population is also dead something that is less likely to occur than it was in the years before this program began. This animal is not worse off than it was in 1998 and the term was not being thrown around so loosely about them.
Incorporate the New Mexico Cattle Growers association Petition for rule change document into scoping and alternatives. Simply ignoring it isn’t an option the paper was presented officially during the 5 year review and thus far FWS has ignored it.
Removal of trapping in the BRWRA and expanded areas is not conducive to the survival of the species as a whole, all released wolves are redundant and not essential to the survival of the species, if one is accidentally trapped on occasion it does not threaten the species.
Delisting and Re-listing of the Mexican wolf
Delist the Mexican wolf with the gray wolf. line bred from one female wolf is not a separate and distinct subspecies. , the only designation that applies here whether they are a distinct subspecies or simply a geographically separate gray wolf is experimental non-essential.
Do not change listing to Essential whether or not such population is essential to the continued existence of an endangered species or a threatened species is the only criteria that matters. With the captive population and breeding animals in place and with the northern populations, none of these wolves are essential to the continued existence of this species. For 16 years non-essential was the legal definition of this animal.
With the substantial captive breeding gene pool, and the wild population being made up of solely redundant animals, this population of wolves is not in danger of extinction and cannot be designated essential.
This wolf populations is an experimental population simply due to the fact that it is made up of genetically redundant wolves and is geographic separation from the main population in the northern part of the country, for the purposes of the ESA. Whether or not it is essential to the continued existence of an endangered species or a threatened species is vague at best after all every single wolf is duplicated genetically in the captive breeding pool.
Critical habitat shall not be designated under this Act for any experimental population determined under subparagraph (B) to be not essential to the continued existence of a species.
The Mexican wolf is not a subspecies of wolf, it is a gray wolf and able to breed with the original species. A grizzly and black bear are separate and distinct subspecies, but a gray wolf and Mexican wolf can breed and therefore are not. The Mexican wolf is simply a line bred, wolf with the distinction of sharing mitochondrial DNA between the gene pool. It does not make it a separate distinct sub species. It is simply a geographically separate population of gray wolves.
For more information please contact NMCGA at 505.247.0584
