What is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services plan for gray wolf management?
Unable to justify depriving endangered species protection from the entire continental U.S. population, the USFWS has taken a divide-and-conquer approach. Rather than apply criteria for endangered species protection to the continental U.S. population as a whole, the USFWS proposed in early February, 2007, that this population should not be treated as a single population but as a set of separate, independent populations, referred to as Distinct Population Segments (DPSs). The current areas occupied by wolves have thus been classified as two DPSs by the USFWS, one in the Northern Rocky Mountains (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and parts of Washington, Oregon, and Utah) and one in the Western Great Lakes (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and parts of the Dakotas, Iowa, Illinois and Ohio). In this way, wolves will no longer be listed as endangered where they actually live but only in areas they historically occupied and no longer occupy.
