For those of you who care about wolves, there is some disturbing news on the Mexican wolf front. After a set of backroom meetings between ranchers and politicians, the Mexican wolf recovery program has adopted proposals that include a moratorium on wolf reintroduction and relocation, continued geographical restrictions to an artificial defined and small recovery area, and most disturbing of all, a preference for lethal over non-lethal measures of wolf management. These proposed policies ignore the recommendations of wolf recovery team, independent scientisits and ethicists, and the moral sentiments of the vast majority of people in the US and North America. Cutting backroom deals violates the spirit, and perhaps the legal letter, of open meetings and transparent public policy. Adopting lethal controls before non-lethal alternatives have been required and applied is simply unethical.

As importantly, wolf recovery has never been a threat to people or their livelihoods. Alongside real misunderstandings and fears about predators like wolves, some politicians and others manipulate such concerns for their own partisan purposes. We can have a deep recovery of Mexican wolves throught the entire portion of their former range, while at the same time meeting the legitimate needs of people affected by this recovery. Restricting wolves within a gulag surrounded by zones of exclusion does not meet scientific or ethical standards for wolf recovery.

You can learn more about this turn of events, as well as contact relevant officials, by visiting the action page at the Center for Biological Diversity, www.actionnetwork.org/campaign/lobo99. You might like to read some of the recent articles and editorials in the Albuquerque Journal as well, http://www.abqjournal.com/. For the full text of the proposed policies, see mexicanwolf.fws.gov/. If you submit comments, please remember that there are many great wolf scientists and managers within the Mexican wolf program and elsewhere. So too there are more well-intentioned ranchers who are pro-wolf than not, but do have livestock and economic issues that require our attention and support. The comment period on these proposed policies ends 31 May 2005.

Practical Ethics will be contributing an ‘ethics brief’ on this issue, and will notify you through this blog when it is available.

cheers, Bill