Bush Administration Doesn’t Want Federal Money To Reimburse Ranchers’ Losses By Wolves

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved the Gray Wolf Livestock Loss Mitigation Act yesterday. This act, should it finds it’s way through Congress, would provide matching funds to state trust funds intended for reimbursement to ranchers for livestock losses due to predation by wolves.

One report from Local News 8 made the statement that the Bush administration was against this bill.

The Bush administration has objected to the bill, saying the payments should be a state responsibility.

Obviously President Bush was not in office when the federal government lied to the people of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and forced reintroduction of the wolf on those residents but that doesn’t excuse refusal to accept responsibility. If the Bush administration thinks this is a state’s responsibility, then why wasn’t it a state’s responsibility to decide whether to bring the wolves back?

Not to dump all the blame on Washington, because the states weren’t exactly jumping up and down against reintroduction.

But perhaps the Bush administration thinks that by making ridiculous statements like this will somehow make the problem go away. And what is that problem?

Reintroduction is history. Even though there are still a lot of bitter feelings toward everyone involved in bringing the wolf back, most are trying to move on but they keep running into roadblocks.

We have to keep asking ourselves just how often the citizens were lied to over the past 13-plus years about wolves, reintroduction, management and the aim of removing the wolf from federal protection.

We already know that the states and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have admitted that the population goal for wolves has easily tripled the stated requirements for delisting the wolf from the Endangered Species Act protection.

Early last year the USFWS announced its intentions to delist the wolf and within hours the activists lined up at the courthouse with their lawsuits. In what to me anyway, appeared to be a poorly crafted and weakly presented case by the feds, a temporary injunction was granted by another activist judge to return the wolf to protection while the final case is heard. The same judge who granted the temporary injunction will hear the main case. Unless the USFWS does something differently, there is little hope that the wolf will be put under the control of the states as President Bush evidently thinks should be.

So exactly what is the Bush administration inferring in that statement? Is he suggesting that the wolf should be taken out of protection and let the states deal with it, or is he like many who have lied to the citizens of those states and turned their backs on them?

I think the residents of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming would like nothing more than to tell the USFWS to get the hell out of their state and leave the wolf management to them but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

And getting back to the questions I’m still asking myself, was it ever the intention of the USFWS to remove the wolf from protection from the very beginning? Some believe this has all been a charade, designed once again to deceive the citizens into thinking the feds cared when they really didn’t.

Granted, the USFWS had the cards stacked heavily against them by having Judge Donald Molloy hearing the case. When you read his ruling, any common man can easily see that Molloy overstepped his authority and granted an injunction on made up evidence and placed the credibility of his decision on one study the USFWS discarded because it was a lousy study that proved nothing.

All of this and yet the USFWS has sat on their hands not even considering an appeal as far as I can tell. I’ve heard nothing. If you will recall, a panel of judges for the U.S. Ninth District unanimously voted that judges should be using science in rendering such decisions as Molloy did. If the USFWS had decided to appeal, this is the court that would have heard the appeal. Doesn’t it make sense to challenge that statement?

But we can only assume the the feds are busting their butts in preparation of the full hearing that will determine whether the wolf remains permanently on the Endangered Species list. I doubt that is happening to be honest. Nothing I have seen encourages me that the USFWS is all that eager to get the wolf into the hands of the states and Bush’s position on not wanting to take responsibility for the actions of his own government is further evidence that our government doesn’t respect the states’ sovereignty or their right to manage their own wildlife. If they had, we wouldn’t be facing this problem now.

On the good side of all this, the ranchers perhaps can sleep a bit better knowing that money is one step closer to finding its way into state trust funds to help offset the great costs of livestock loss from wolves.

Tom Remington

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