The petition submitted yesterday by the Global Indigenous Council and some two dozen other groups seeks to add enforcement teeth to an existing requirement that states not compromise healthy wildlife populations.
Tactically, the petition is trying to counter states that in recent years have expanded predator control programs and permitted controversial practices including baiting, use of dogs, aerial spotting and deployment of artificial lights for nighttime hunting.
“Federal officials must stop ignoring the use of conservation funding by anti-wolf states to slaughter ecologically important carnivores,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Federal wildlife management funds should only be given to states that can be trusted to conserve their wildlife for all Americans.”
The petition asks Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to adopt regulations making states ineligible for grants under the Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act and Sport Fish Restoration Act if they allow hunting and trapping at levels that compromise healthy populations of wildlife, including predators.
About $1 billion in federal aid is provided annually to state game agencies.
The funding comes from taxes on sporting firearms and ammunition. States can use the money for projects, including wildlife research, buying habitat and hunter education.
Advocates described the petition as “a reaction to recent actions in states such as Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Wisconsin to, in essence, declare open season on wolves.”
“A healthy predator-prey relationship is necessary for healthy wildlife populations as a whole,” said Rick Steiner, a Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility board member and retired University of Alaska professor.
Steiner added that “no state, including Alaska, should receive millions of dollars in federal wildlife restoration aid each year, while they continue ecologically destructive efforts to severely reduce or eliminate populations of wolves, bears, coyotes and mountain lions.”
The petition was filed the same day Yellowstone National Park officials announced that three gray wolves had been killed by Montana hunters. The two female pups and a female yearling were killed outside the park's northern boundary in the first week after wolf season opened earlier this month, park officials said.
Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed more open-ended hunting laws described as intended to reduce wolves’ attacks on livestock and big game herds. Ranchers say they lose a bundle every year to those attacks.
Idaho legislation passed this year allows the state to hire private contractors to kill wolves and expands the hunting of predators to allow the use of snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, as well as the killing of newborn pups and nursing mothers on private land .
"We have areas of the state where the wolves are having a real detrimental impact on our wildlife," Idaho House Majority Leader Mike Moyle (R) said in May. "They are hurting the herds, elk and deer.”