A settlement agreement between environmental groups, USDA’s Wildlife Services (WS), the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management requires WS to complete an environmental review of the agency’s wolf management actions in Idaho by 2024.
The settlement stipulates that in its final environmental impact statement, WS will consider implementing alternatives to lethal removal in wilderness areas and public lands, restricting wolf damage management in areas of environmental concern, blocking the use of sodium cyanide (M-44s) and snare traps to target gray wolves, and establishing a 72-hour trap check requirement. The settlement allows predator control “in response to a witnessed or documented, confirmed livestock depredation or attack.”
According to WildEarth Guardians—one of the groups in the suit—the settlement follows a separate March 2020 settlement that restricted the places where WS could kill wolves in Idaho. Predator protections under both agreements will be in place until WS completes the new environmental impact statement in 2024.
“I think this settlement layers on some additional protections for wolves,” Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project’s executive director, told the Associated Press. “We got some of what we wanted (in the agreement). But, quite frankly, we’d like Wildlife Services to get out of the business of killing native wildlife entirely.”
