Williams: Squash the Pet and Livestock Protection Act
Valley Voices
The Pet and Livestock Protection Act (H.R. 845), authored by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), passed the House on Dec. 18. Now it’s before the Senate.
The bill is a study in ecological illiteracy, rife with ancient wolf mythology. Even the bill’s title is a myth. Wolves kill few pets, none if they’re well-tended or kept indoors. Cattle loss, usually compensated, is far less than wolf haters allege. Most sheep predation is by coyotes, and the only coyote control that ever worked is wolves.
The bill would cancel Endangered Species Act (ESA) protection for wolves. Such protection, writes Boebert, is the work of “leftists (who) cower to radical environmentalists.”
Boebert correctly notes that wolves have “rebounded,” but only to about 7,000 across all 48 contiguous states. And the constant slaughter of wolves in the Northern Rockies renders it virtually inevitable that, if ESA protection is removed, at some point it will again be necessary.
That can’t happen if Boebert’s bill succeeds because it contains a provision to block judicial review of delisting. Even if Congress’s action is legally flawed and violates core tenets of the ESA, there would be no recourse.
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In Montana, wolf quotas are increasingly liberal. In 2023 alone, a quarter of the state’s wolves were killed. The population is declining by about 100 animals per year. The state allows continuous wolf hunting and trapping until 452 wolves are killed.
Idaho places a bounty on wolves. And Idaho and Wyoming permit wolves to be choked to death with neck snares, gunned down from helicopters, shot at night, killed by dogs, burned in their dens (both pups and nursing mothers) and run down and crushed with snowmobiles — a sport known as “wolf whacking.”
Elk are being depleted by wolves, wrongly proclaim the Sportsmen’s Alliance, Safari Club International and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, all of which sued to block ESA wolf protection. In most of their range, elk are dangerously above population objectives. The real issue for these litigants is that with a few wolves back in the ecosystem, elk are acting like elk again. No longer do they stand and gawk at hunters when they stop their trucks and roll down windows.
In the words of Dan Ashe, an enlightened hunter and former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Emerging science tells us that these apex predators aren’t the enemy; they’re allies.”
Explaining why is Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action. “Random killing of wolves only exacerbates wolf conflicts,” he says. “It eliminates mature wolves skilled at killing traditional cervid prey (deer, elk and moose), leaving younger wolves that don’t have these hunting skills and kill livestock. And wolves are a bulwark against Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in cervids. Wolves selectively remove cervids debilitated by this fatal brain-wasting disease, now rampant in thirty-six states and five Canadian provinces. Wolves, immune to CWD, remove CWD prions (self-replicating, non-living proteins) from the environment, destroying them via digestion.”
“Killing off the wolf allowed chronic wasting disease to take hold in the first place,” opined Princeton University biologist Dr. Andrew Dobson and University of Calgary biologist Dr. Valerius Geist in The Denver Post.
CWD may jump to humans. “We are quite unprepared,” warns Dr. Michael Osterholm, Center for Infectious Disease director at the University of Minnesota. “If we saw a spillover (to humans) right now, we would be in free fall.”
The Pet and Livestock Protection Act is an abomination that wound undo decades of enlightened wildlife management. The Senate needs to squash it.
