Snapshot Wisconsin / WI DNR
There could be a Wisconsin wolf hunt as early as fall 2024 if wolves are delisted.
After months of research, public input and hearings, the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board approved a new wolf management plan in October. It would seem a done deal, but nothing is simple when it comes to wolves in Wisconsin. The plan is being challenged in court and could soon face its first implementation test.
On Feb. 2 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to release a proposed rule on whether gray wolves should be removed from the list of endangered species in Wisconsin and the rest of states in the “lower-48” (excluding the Rocky Mountain population). If delisted, the state of Wisconsin is required under a 2011 law to hold a public wolf hunt.
Some on the Natural Resources Board are bracing for that possibility. “We can’t afford to have 2021 happen again,” Douglas Cox, Menominee tribal legislator and a member of the DNR board, said at the DNR board meeting where the new plan was approved.
In February 2021 the state held a quickly arranged and poorly timed wolf hunt during the wolf mating season. In just 72 hours hunters killed nearly 218 of the state’s estimated 1,100 wolves. As Ron Seely wrote in Isthmus, “Hunters, mostly using packs of radio-collared dogs and ATVs, killed 99 more wolves than the quota of 119 set by the agency, an excess of 83 percent.”
Randy Johnson, the large carnivore specialist for the DNR, says in an interview that several scenarios for Wisconsin are possible depending on what rule the feds propose. He says the DNR’s goal is to be fully prepared for any potential change in listing status for gray wolves.
If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommends fully removing wolves from the endangered species list “we are prepared to do a harvest season as soon as fall 2024,” says Johnson. That assumes the recently approved management plan remains in place and its companion administrative rule is approved by the Legislature, Johnson adds.
The management plan specifies some things, like the number of hours (eight) to register a wolf kill after harvest, but leaves other things flexible. Johnson says the next step would be to put together a wolf advisory committee with a variety of “stakeholders” that would review data to determine the number of wolves that could be harvested. “That would be based on our current population estimates,” he says. That review would be forwarded to the DNR and its leadership team would ultimately make a recommendation to the Natural Resources Board. “It is similar to what we go through with other harvested species,” he says.
The federal agency could also propose a partial delisting of wolves to “threatened status,” says Johnson. That would not trigger a public hunt but would allow state residents and tribal members to use “lethal control options” if wolves are threatening their domestic animals.
The agency could also recommend the status quo. A spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tells Isthmus that, barring any legal interventions, whatever rule is proposed will have to go through at least a 60-day public comment period before any final decision is made.
The federal government first listed gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act more than 40 years ago but delisted them in October 2020 under the Trump administration. The DNR was subsequently compelled by court order to hold a wolf hunt four months later where hunters killed up to one-third of the wolf population.
In February 2022 a federal judge struck down the decision to delist wolves and ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to relist the gray wolf as an endangered species (with the exception of wolves in Alaska and the Rocky Mountains).
Wisconsin’s 2021 hunt was guided by the state’s 1999 wolf management plan (reaffirmed with an addendum in 2007), that identified the wolf population outside of tribal territories at 350. For years hunting advocates and conservationists have disagreed over whether that number was a population goal or cap, and how it should shape wolf hunts. Researchers now estimate that there are more than 1,000 wolves in Wisconsin.
The state’s new wolf management plan does not set a population goal for the species. Hunter Nation, the hunting advocacy organization that filed the lawsuit that ultimately compelled the DNR to hold the 2021 wolf hunt, believes there are too many wolves in the state and has argued that the high kill count during the hunt proved “just how overpopulated” the state is with wolves. Hunter Nation is currently advocating for the gray wolf to be delisted again, blaming its growing population for a reduction in deer, elk and moose, a claim scientists dispute.
During the Natural Resources Board meeting where the management plan was approved, the DNR’s Johnson said the agency was moving away from a “population goal approach,” and instead focusing on things like “ensuring a healthy and sustainable wolf population, addressing and reducing wolf conflicts” and providing “regulated public hunting and trapping of wolves consistent with state law.”
Even before the management plan passed, and with the support of hunters, the state Senate passed a bill that would require the DNR to set a population goal for wolves. At a November 2023 hearing, Adrian Wydeven, who headed wolf management at the DNR for 35 years before retiring in 2015, testified against the Assembly’s version of the bill.
“Wisconsin farmers, hunters, trappers and other citizens are best served by a wolf management plan that focuses on sound science, ecological benefits and flexible state management to reduce conflicts, instead of relying on a low numeric goal that stymies sound management,” said Wydeven, who is now a member of Wisconsin’s Green Fire, a wildlife conservation group devoted to science-informed analysis and policy solutions.
On Jan. 25, the Assembly approved the Senate’s version of the bill. Britt Cudaback, Gov. Tony Evers’ communications director, says the governor will veto the bill.
Meanwhile a conservation group, the Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance, has filed a lawsuit asking a Dane County court to invalidate the wolf management plan. The group alleges that the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board and DNR “selectively” ignored and disfavored the group’s public comments and scientific research submitted into the record, which silenced the alliance’s “voice in violation of its right to public participation and denied them due process and equal protection under the law.”
“There is no evidence that these comments were seriously evaluated or considered at all during the DNR’s review of public comments,” the lawsuit continues.
Adrian Treves, an environmental scientist and founder of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at UW-Madison, has been critical of the DNR for not fully considering science in its policy decisions. Former DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp, who served under Gov. Scott Walker, gutted the department’s once vaunted science division and Treves says he still sees remnants of her administration, including the “cherry-picking [of] scientific evidence that fits a predetermined policy decision or a predetermined policy outcome.”
Treves objects in particular to the wolf management plan’s use of wolf hunting as a way to reduce predation of livestock.
“It’s a really long-held wildlife management belief that you can’t exist with certain wild animals,” he says. While the issue has not been studied in Wisconsin, Treves cites studies from Michigan, France and Slovenia which found no evidence that wolf killing alleviates livestock predation.
The current scientific consensus, he adds, is “that sort of killing is sometimes counterproductive, and rarely effective.”
Wisconsin’s Green Fire released a public statement in opposition to the lawsuit, in part to dissociate itself from Greenfire Law, which is representing Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance, but also to voice support for the wolf plan. Wydeven of Wisconsin’s Green Fire says in an interview that the plan does a “terrific job” of balancing competing interests by focusing on conservation “in the areas of the best habitat where wolves are providing the most ecological benefits.”
In areas of “marginal habitat,” where the ecological benefits of wolves are more limited and there are likely to be more conflicts, “there’s more emphasis on controlling the wolf population,” Wydeven says. “That to me, seems like a reasonable balance.”
Between efforts to require a population goal for wolves, the unapproved administrative rule, and a pending lawsuit seeking to toss the management plan completely, there is no shortage of uncertainty over wolf management as state officials wait to hear word from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“We have stayed in touch with the Fish and Wildlife Service but I can’t tell you what [the proposed rule] is going to be,” says Johnson. “We are in the same boat with many other states.”
[Editor's note: This article incorrectly noted that Adrian Treves is not involved in the lawsuit brought by the Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance. While he is not a plaintiff, he is a standing declarant and plans to write an affidavit in support of the petitioners.]
