Trump administration ‘threatens’ NC’s endangered red wolves, other species, report says

There are fewer than 300 red wolves left alive, and a recent report from national animal welfare organizations says the Trump administration could push them closer to extinction.

The Animal Welfare Institute and the Endangered Species Coalition prepared a report listing “10 animals threatened by the administration’s existing and proposed policies.”

The report comes just a month after a judge ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act by ending protections for the rare wolves, often killed by property owners or those who mistake them for coyotes, The News & Observer previously reported.

Efforts by federal agencies to establish new rules governing the species could make it “harder to designate critical habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife and to protect species impacted by climate change. The proposed rules would also make it easier to remove listed species and reduce protections for threatened species,” according to a news release from AWI and ESC.

The report from the Endangered Species Coalition, “Extinction Plan: Ten Species Imperiled by the Trump Administration,” lists the species that “would suffer” under the proposed rules:

▪ “Red wolf”

▪ “California condor”

▪ “Giraffe”

▪ “Hellbender”

▪ “Humboldt marten”

▪ “Sea turtles, leatherback and loggerhead”

▪ “Rusty patched bumble bee”

▪ “San Bernardino kangaroo rat”

▪ “West Indian manatee”

▪ “Western yellow-billed cuckoo”

The report highlights North Carolina’s red wolf, which the ESC called “the most endangered canid on Earth, and one of its rarest mammals.”

Red wolves once lived across the southeast, the report says, but “fell victim to intensive predator control programs and loss of habitat during the 19th and 20th centuries.”

In 1980, the red wolf was “declared extinct in the wild,” The News & Observer previously reported, based on court documents. .

In November, a federal judge ruled that the wildlife service violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, The News & Observer previously reported.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was “tasked in 1986 with trying to help the (red wolf) species recover through management and reintroduction programs,” the N&O reported.

Though the animal welfare organizations cite actions by the Trump administration as “imperiling” and “threatening” the red wolf and other species in the new report, conservation groups have sought legal recourse on behalf of the critically endangered animals since 2015, during the Obama administration.

In 2015, the wildlife service was accused in a lawsuit filed by conservation groups of allowing “red wolves that were not causing any problems to be shot and killed by private landowners,” according to the lawsuit, as previously reported by the N&O.

“The lawsuit also accused the federal agency of rolling back measures that had helped the red wolf population grow from 16 in 1987 to more than 130,” the N&O previously reported. Then the wolves were reintroduced to a “five-county area in northeastern North Carolina,” according to AWI.

There are as few as 40 red wolves living in the wild as of April 2018, court records show, and of those, there are only “two or three breeding pairs,” according to AWI.

“The wild red wolf population has declined by over 70 percent in the past four years alone, falling from approximately 100 individuals in 2014 to fewer than 30 individuals in 2018, largely due to government mismanagement,” Johanna Hamburger, AWI wildlife attorney, said in a statement. “Taken together, these proposals all but guarantee that red wolves will once again be driven to extinction in the wild in less than a decade.”

Dec. 28 is also the 45th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, according to AWI.

Under proposed federal regulations, the Trump administration could remove the red wolf from the endangered species list, “based on any new genetic information, even though red wolf genetics are still under active scientific investigation and no scientific consensus has been reached,” according to AWI.

Efforts by the wildlife service to reduce the protected range of the wolves in North Carolina by nearly 90 percent, and allow any wolves outside to be killed, were halted by the judge in November, who “made permanent the court’s September 29, 2016, order stopping the USFWS from capturing and killing red wolves and authorizing private landowners to do the same,” according to the conservation groups, the N&O previously reported.

This story was originally published December 18, 2018 at 9:16 PM.