This letter is in response to an online-only piece from our community blog, the Range, entitled: Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
You’d be hard-pressed to find a biologist who would characterize the Northern Rockies wolf population as anything other than recovered. This is a textbook case of how recovery is supposed to work.
While I agree it was very unfortunate that Tester and Simpson went about removing protection in this way, they’re just doing their jobs and trying to get re-elected. Their constituents have been demanding this for years. A few environmental litigation groups realized that their “no compromise” strategy of indefinitely delaying delisting was going to backfire on them, but by then, it was obviously too late. I think this strategy, and these groups, are somewhat responsible for what happened here. And now we have a rather unfortunate precedent that’s not ever going to go away.
Joe Smith
Bozeman, Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A textbook recovery.
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