I recently provided comments on the Five-Year Review of the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Program. In spite of significant obstacles, the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team achieved notable success in bringing wolves back to the American southwest.

While recommending that the reintroduction project continue, the comments suggest modifications to the ecological and ethical dimensions of the program. Modifications to the ecological dimension should allow wolves to establish territories outside the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area, modify the final rule so that wolves can be released in the Gila National Forest, reintroduce Mexican wolves into other areas in critical need of this top-level carnivore — e.g. Sky Island ecosystem, Grand Canyon, remove all artificial caps on population goals and geographic distribution, and allow wolves to naturally recolonize the entire area of their historic range.

To meet its ethical obligations, the program should also minimize the use of lethal controls and intensive interventions; maximize the use of proactive non-lethal measures of conflict management, support the ‘living with predators’ programs of wildlife and animal protection non-profits, and add an explicit ethics component to the program.

You can read the comments I sent to the OFWC below. I hope they may be of some help as you frame your own letters of support for wolf recovery.

You can find more information on Mexican wolf reintroduction at the Program website (mexicanwolf.fws.gov/). General information on Mexican wolves can be found at Defenders of Wildlife (www.defenders.org/wildlife/wolf/ellobo.html) and the Wolf Conservation Center (www.nywolf.org/). The Rewilding Institute has posted a detailed set of comments on the technical, administrative and socioeconomic aspects of the review (rewilding.org/graywolfreview.html). For more on the ethical dimensions of wolf recovery, visit the wolf section of Practical Ethics (www.practicalethics.net/).

cheers, Bill

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US Fish and Wildlife Service New Mexico Ecological Services Office 2105 Osuna NE Albuquerque, NM 87113

15 March 2005

RE: Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Program Five-Year Review

Dear Members of the Review Committees,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Five-Year Review of the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Program.

For the record I am Bill Lynn (William S. Lynn, Ph.D.), founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics, an ethics practice committed to the well-being of people, animal and nature. For more information, please visit www.practicalethics.net.

Overall, I support the continuation of the program with modifications. I would also like to offer several suggestions to improve the ecological and ethical aspects of the program.

From the outset, I want to commend the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team for their work and success to date, especially in the face of significant barriers, limitation and resistance. Having said that, and without diminishing their hard work in any way, the program can and should be strengthened in terms of its ecological and ethical foundations.

Ecologically, the program should aim for a more robust vision of recovery. A deep recovery of wolves across the landscape should ensure greater genetic diversity, maximal distribution and interaction of distinct population segments within a region, and less intervention in wolf social structures. To do this, the program should:

• allow wolves to establish territories outside the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area;
• modify the final rule so that wolves can be released in the Gila National Forest;
• quickly reintroduce Mexican wolves into other area within their historic range that are in critical need of this top-level carnivore, e.g. Sky Island ecosystem, Grand Canyon;
• remove all artificial caps on population goals and geographic distribution; and
• allow wolves to naturally recolonize the entire area of their historic range.

Ethically, both the program and its review are weak. I believe this is unintentional, and would be mitigated by a rigorous inquiry into the moral values that ought to guide the program and its implementation. It is true that the socioeconomic assessment will discuss economic and other quantifiable values, but these are a small segment of the range of values having significance in planning for and managing wolves. Moreover the ethical question is not what values are ‘out there’, but which values ought to guide our efforts at wolf recovery. To improve its ethical foundation, the program should:

• minimize the use of lethal controls and intensive interventions;
• maximize the use of proactive non-lethal measures of conflict management support the ‘living with predators’ programs of wildlife and animal protection non-profits; and
• add an ethics component to complement the technical, administrative and socioeconomic components of the program.

Please recall that we have ethical responsibilities to both people and the natural world, and this includes wolves whether considered as individuals or a species. We ought to seek a biologically rich world, not a gulag of isolated relic landscapes and species. We meet our responsibilities to wolves through their fulsome recovery across their original range. We fail when wolves are restricted by artificially low populations, boundaries beyond which recovery is forbidden or undermined, or management practices that are not firmly grounded in ethics.

The ethical reasons for wolf recovery are diverse and mutually supporting. For some, wolves are a biological heritage we ought to restore and conserve for our children, citizenry and the world. Future generations will condemn us for failing to take reasonable steps in this regard. Many see in wolves the hand of a Creator for whom the natural world, including wolves, is good. Humans are thereby the stewards of Creation, and wolf recovery is a sacred obligation. Others believe wolves are more than functional units of ecosystems, more than resources for humans to use. Rather, wolves are self-aware and social beings. This gives wolves, as it does people, a moral standing when it comes to human actions that, for better or worse, have consequences for individuals, packs, populations and species. In this worldview, wolf restoration is an act of restitution for past harms done to creatures with whom we share a common landscape and earthly fate. For still others, wolves are top predators contributing to the health and well-being of the larger community of life. Wolves generate a kind of ‘natural good’ that, while unintentional on their part, is indispensable to ethical adjudications of how we ought to live with the natural world.

Wolves are an indicator not only of the health of a natural landscape, but the moral health of our culture. A society that learns to live with wolves across a wide range of wild and humanized landscapes is a society that is making substantial progress towards respecting human needs, caring for other forms of life, and living sustainably with the natural world. The Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Program should continue with modifications that envision and implement an ethically defensible, deep recovery of wolves across the entirety of their historic range.

Sincerely,

William S. Lynn, Ph.D.
Senior Ethics Advisor
Practical Ethics

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Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.