A district judge has ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to revise its recovery plan for the Mexican gray wolf, ruling the agency must produce a new draft within six months and a final plan no later than a year.
The order comes after a coalition of wolf advocate groups (including Earthjustice, Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife) filed suit against the Trump administration in January 2018, claiming its Mexican gray wolf recovery plan was “deeply flawed.”
“Rather than set the Mexican gray wolf on a course towards recovery, FWS’s new Recovery Plan for the species arbitrarily and unlawfully sets population and management targets that are inadequate to ensure the wolf’s conservation and survival,” the groups wrote in their suit.
On Oct. 14, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Zipps ruled in favor of the conservation groups, agreeing the groups adequately asserted a violation of a procedural rule.
“The Court concludes Plaintiffs have Article III standing to challenge the Service’s failure to incorporate into the Plan the required site-specific management actions and objective, measurable criteria,” Zipps wrote.
She added that because the recovery plan is supposed to be the process that neutralizes the recognized threats to the wolf’s existence, “The Service’s alleged failure to identify actions and criteria in response to those threats creates a reasonable probability that Plaintiffs’ interests in viewing the wolf in the future are threatened.”
In addition, she agreed the plan does not contain site-specific management actions to address the threat of illegal wolf killings.
“According to the Service, 16 of the 24 management actions listed in the table address the threat of mortality of the species. But review of the recovery actions shows that few relate to human-caused mortality,” Zipps ruled. “Further, many of the listed actions are so vague as to not constitute an action at all.”
Only three site-specific actions are close to management actions to address the threat of human-caused mortality, she continued. One action calls for developing regulations and management and monitoring plans to maintain viable populations after delisting. The other two actions call for Mexican gray wolf education and outreach programs, but these are so vague that “One must speculate and guess what educational action or regulatory development might be taken which would pertain to reducing human-caused mortality.”
The plan also calls for a reduction in Mexican gray wolf and livestock conflicts, but does not identify any management action to reduce such conflicts, Zipps said.
She wrote that although “The Court acknowledges that ‘it is not necessary for a recovery plan to be an exhaustively detailed document,’” a recovery plan that recognizes specific threats to a species, but fails to recommend corrective actions, does not meet the Endangered Species Act standard.
Zipps noted the USFWS’ separate recovery implementation strategy shows that site-specific actions could be included in the recovery plan. The recovery implementation strategy includes actions specific to the threat of human-caused mortality, education and outreach opportunities, and increasing law enforcement presence to investigate wolf mortalities.
“While the Service states that it is impracticable to include in the Plan ‘specific sites’ for proposed management actions, the Service does not argue that, and the record does not provide any rationale to explain why, the management actions contained in the Implementation Strategy could not be included in the Plan,” Zipps wrote.
As such, the court remanded the matter back to USFWS to revise the recovery plan to include site-specific actions.
In response to the ruling, Elizabeth Forsyth, Earthjustice attorney, said, “More than 70 percent of documented Mexican wolf mortalities are human-caused. We’re glad that the court has recognized that for the Mexican wolf to survive, the Fish and Wildlife Service must put in place a robust plan that includes concrete actions to address the threat of illegal killing.” — Anna Miller,WLJ managing editor
