MILWAUKEE (CN) — The kill quota for Wisconsin’s gray wolf hunting and trapping season this fall was set at 300 by a natural resources board on Wednesday, as state wildlife management agencies face scrutiny following a controversial wolf hunt in February that exceeded its quota in less than three days.
The 300-wolf quota entered by a 5-2 vote of the Natural Resources Board, or NRB — whose members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate to set policy for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources — more than doubles the quota of 130 proposed by the DNR in July.
DNR officials had previously said and repeated at Wednesday’s all-day meeting that the proposed quota reflected an effort to be as conservative as possible to avoid reducing the total wolf population of the state, particularly given the negative attention heaped on Wisconsin after legal wrangling led to a rushed wolf hunt in February that surpassed its quota in just over 60 hours.
In late 2020, Donald Trump’s administration removed gray wolves from the list of endangered species protected under the Endangered Species Act, a move that faced opposition from 86 members of Congress, 100 scientists and 1.8 million Americans. Gray wolves were officially delisted on Jan. 4, 2021.
In light of the federal change, the NRB decided to postpone any wolf hunt in Wisconsin until this fall. However, conservative advocacy group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, or WILL, sued on behalf of Kansas-based pro-hunting outfit Hunter Nation, saying that a 2011 Wisconsin law requires the DNR to allow a wolf hunt if they are not on the endangered species list and that it had to do so by the end of February 2021.
Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Bennett Brantmeier ruled in favor of WILL and the hunters and issued a writ on Feb. 11 requiring a gray wolf hunting and trapping season that month. An appeal by the DNR failed, and the hastily planned season took place from Feb. 22 through Feb. 24.
The quota for state-licensed hunters that season was set at 119, with an additional 81 tags declared by state Native American tribes in ceded territory protected by treaties and court orders encompassing more than one-third of Wisconsin, or much of the northern part of the state.
But the February season resulted in 218 wolves being killed in less than three days, drawing outrage from environmentalists and animal rights activists and generating national and international headlines.
Now the DNR, under close watch following February’s hunt, must plan an unprecedented second wolf hunt in a single calendar year. It weighed potential impacts of the February hunt — including that it took place during the wolves’ breeding season, potentially resulting in less pups being born and general pack disruption — before arriving at an admittedly cautious quota of 130 for the season scheduled to begin on Nov. 6.
DNR statistics ahead of February’s hunt estimate there are roughly 1,195 gray wolves and about 256 packs in Wisconsin. National estimates put the population of the species at around 6,000.
Changes to the quota at the NRB’s occasionally chippy meeting on Wednesday were driven by charges from some members that the DNR was juking the statistics and playing games with its proposal and that the agency was not doing enough to effectively manage the state’s wolf population, which statistics indicate is currently the highest it has been in at least four decades. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed gray wolves as endangered in 1974 and their population has slowly rebounded in the lower 48 states since then.
Of considerable disagreement between some board members and DNR Secretary Preston Cole was a 1999 wolf management plan that included a population goal of 350 wolves, but no one could agree on what that number meant. Some NRB members, like Greg Kazmierski, considered this number grounds to increase the season’s harvest quota. DNR officials, like Fish, Wildlife and Parks Division Administrator Keith Warnke, insisted that two-decade old number was intended as a minimum population threshold to use as a base for further management strategies that had nothing to do with harvest quotas.
The DNR is currently working on a new wolf management plan, but it likely will not be completed until the middle of 2022.
Kazmierski on Wednesday unsuccessfully attempted to amend the DNR’s proposal to get the fall quota set at 504 wolves and the number of licenses granted set at 10 times the non-tribal quota, something Cole derided as “outrageous.”
Fifty-five members of the public weighed in virtually at Wednesday’s meeting, with the majority of them condemning the idea of having another wolf hunt in the fall at all and charging the DNR with turning a blind eye to unethical hunting methods used during the February hunt, such as hunters using packs of dogs to track and attack wolves in what some called state-sanctioned dog fighting.
Wisconsin is the only state where packs of dogs are allowed in wolf hunts. Hunters can also use bait to attract wolves and can pursue them at night, but not with dogs, per DNR rules. Trappers can use foot-hold traps or cable restraints to ensnare wolves.
John Johnson, Sr., president of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, asserted that members of his and other Native American tribes view the wolves as brothers, said the DNR’s conservative quota is necessary and decried those “clamouring for more blood from our brother.”
Luke Hilgemann, the president and CEO of Hunter Nation, appeared in support of allowing the hunt and increasing the quota. He said that national anti-hunting groups were spending millions to spread misinformation about wolf hunting and threatened the DNR with immediate lawsuits if they lower the kill or license quotas for November’s hunt.
Warnke said the DNR has received about 27,000 wolf tag applications as of Wednesday. The application period ended on Aug. 1 and those licenses are scheduled to begin getting doled out in September. The DNR says 2,830 harvest authorizations were made available for February’s hunt out of more than 27,000 applications.
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