A good friend of mine who is on the board of 'Defenders of Wild Life' is frantically sending out the following email to everyone she knows, trying to stop this bill (written by Bush administration), a bill based on inaccurate science and completely ignoring the basic qualifications of any animal listed on the Endangered Species Act. (see below).
Any help we can get, would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
blue cayuga.
Dear Friends,
It is not to late to save the wolves, I am attaching some talking points (below) if you can lend your assistance publicizing this problem, it would help more than you know. We at the Defenders of Wildlife cannot do it alone. We need grassroots support and we know if people were aware of what is going on, they would raise hell. Take a couple minutes, send letters to the editors of your local papers, to the N.Y.Times: letters@nytimes.com or faxing 212~556-3622, the Washington Post: letters@washpost.com, contact your U.S. Senators, Congress man\woman, governor, state senator, (all their email addresses here: http://www.usa.gov/... ) send them the information below and ask them to help us with our legal action. If you have any ideas we haven't listed, call us, A. Park Gomer @ 607 257 9289 or the Director of Communications at Defenders, Cindy Hoffman @ 202 772 3255. Let's save these beautiful animals we worked so hard to successfully bring back their numbers and successfully reintroduced to their natural environment.
Yours,
A. Park Gomer
Vice President of the Park Foundation
Board Member Defenders of Wild Life
Timing/Facts:
* April 2nd – Secretary of the Interior announced decision to move forward with Bush administration’s delisting rule
* May 4th – delisting rule officially goes into effect. Affects the Idaho and Montana wolf populations. Wyoming is not a part of the delisting.
* Estimated current population of 1600 wolves in region. Rule only requires states to maintain 450 or fewer of this population.
* Idaho, which hosts the core of the wolf population, has already initiated plans to aggressively reduce its state wolf population as soon as federal protections are lifted. There are 26 packs on the short-list of packs that may be targeted (preemptively wiped out in entirety) come May 4.
Top-line messages:
* Under this inadequate federal delisting rule, as much as two-thirds of the current Northern Rockies wolf population can be killed. This loss will mean the population20is nowhere near being recovered, and it will pose a great threat to genetic diversity between populations – something that is not firmly established even at the current numbers.
* It is deeply disappointing that Secretary Salazar missed a major opportunity to work with conservationists, scientists, ranchers, hunters and other stakeholders to resolve the issues that must be resolved to ensure that wolf recovery continues and the requirements of the Endangered Species Act are met.
* Instead, this short-sighted decision has forced us to return to the courts to again challenge the same flawed plan that was rejected by a federal judge just last summer.
o If asked legal specifics: (We filed a 60-day notice letter when the rule was published in the federal register on April 2. We can’t do anything until June 4th ... after 60 days. Then we will assess where we are, see if an injunction is necessary.)
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* We do look forward to celebrating the transfer of wolves to state management but not until a federal delisting rule is developed that ensures the future of wolves in the region.
* This plan ignores current science on what wolves need to maintain a healthy population over the long term. It also ignores the hundreds of thousands of citizens who have asked for a better plan.
o (more specific on science...if needed) In particular, the delisting20rule ignores contemporary scientific research on what constitutes a recovered wolf population and allows wolf populations to be reduced to the point where they could not achieve the natural genetic connectivity thought by=2 0scientists to be essential to the species’ long-term survival in the region.
The bottom line is this: All of the reasons why this plan was a bad idea when the Bush administration proposed it still stand today. It fails to meet the legal or biological requirements for delisting.
More Detailed Timeline and Background:
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published the delisting of the Northern Rockies wolf on January 27, 2008. Defenders of Wildlife filed a 60-day notice on that very day, and the wolves lost federal protections and became subject to the state plans on Friday, March2028th. On July 18, 2008, the U.S. District Court in Missoula granted our preliminary injunction to wolf conservation temporarily placing Northern Rockies wolves back under federal prote ction and preventing the hunts from going forward but not before we lost all the known wolves in southwestern Wyoming.
On October 14, 2008, the U.S. District Court in Missoula, Montana granted the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s request to officially withdraw its 2008 Delisting Rule for Northern Rockies wolves. Only 10 days after withdrawing the 2007 Northern Rockies wolf delisting proposal, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) reopened a comment period on same proposal.
On January 14, 2009 the Bush Administration once again delisted wolves in the Northern Rockies. However, on January 21st, 2009 the Interior Department (under the new Administration) said it was withdrawing the rule before it could formally take effect.
On April 2nd the Department of the Interior, under the Obama administration, went forward with the January 14 Bush delisting plan.
This rule will go into effect on May 4, 2009. We are challenging this in court.
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