Top U.S. officials say Wyo. wolf rule shouldn’t have been nixed

U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both indicated Wednesday that a federal judge should not have relinquished Wyoming’s management rights for gray wolves. “It’s a shame really,” Ashe told the Business Report, adding that Wyoming since the 2012 inception of state control has over-performed on the area for which Judge Amy Berman Jackson vacated the entire rule. The rule was vacated in its entirety because, Jackson said, that the state wasn’t legally bound to its goals of maintaining a certain amount of wolves and breeding pairs within the state. “The court concludes that it was arbitrary and capricious for the [Fish and Wildlife] Service to rely on the state’s nonbinding promises to maintain a particular number of wolves when the availability of that specific numerical buffer was such a critical aspect of the delisting decision,” Jackson wrote in her opinion. She agreed, however, with scientists who said the population had recovered and that she wouldn’t argue with the science behind Wyoming’s management. Even so, when Wyoming passed an emergency rule “establishing that Wyoming’s commitment under its management plan is legally enforceable,” Jackson stuck to her decision, undoing years of work on the management shift in one fell swoop of her pen. Ashe said the rule now has to be reconstructed from the ground up, including the time-intensive public comment period. He said it will likely take between tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands to get Wyoming back in control. He said instead of a complete throwing out of the rule, it should have been remanded to deal with the one problem as Jackson saw it, something that “certainly would’ve saved a lot of taxpayer dollars.” “The judge took a small defect to make a large decision of vacating the rule,” Ashe said, indicating the service will move to delist the gray wolf again. Ashe’s boss, Interior Secretary Jewell, said she was also “very frustrated” with Jackson’s decision, saying the delisting in Wyoming was justified and the state exhibited strong cooperation with federal agencies in the process...more