BOISE, Idaho — The Idaho Department of Fish and Game Commission voted 4-3 Monday to let hunters shoot 220 wolves during a hunting season due to start in September.
Environmental groups who have challenged the lifting of federal protections from wolves in Idaho and Montana immediately said “hunting of an imperiled species at any level is inappropriate,” and may seek to stop hunts.
One big-game advocacy group, however, said the quota should have been set higher.
Idaho’s policy to shoot one-quarter of Idaho’s estimated 880 wolves was approved during a meeting in Idaho Falls, though commissioners don’t foresee the roughly 70,000 hunters expected to buy an Idaho wolf-hunting tag succeeding in filling the 220-wolf quota.
It was approved after commissioners voted against an alternative that would have allowed hunters to shoot up to 430, or 49 percent, of the predators some hunters blame for eating too many elk and ranchers complain prey on sheep and cattle.
Last month, wildlife officials in neighboring Montana voted to let hunters in that state shoot 75 wolves starting in mid-September.
Idaho Fish and Game Commission members said that without a hunt, there will be about 1,020 wolves in the state at the end of 2009.
They’ve concluded there are enough roaming Idaho’s backcountry — and straying into more urban locales like the resort region of Sun Valley — that a hunt at these levels won’t put the species’ survival in jeopardy.
“Neither our sportsmen, our ranchers or our elk herds can wait any longer,” said Fish and Game Commission chairman Wayne Wright, from Twin Falls, in a post-vote telephone interview with reporters. “It’s time.”
Commissioners said they’re sticking to their 2008 goal of eventually reducing Idaho’s wolf population to about 518 animals, but said the threat of litigation — and the conviction that hunters are unlikely to kill even 220 animals this year — made aiming higher inflammatory and unrealistic.
“The pending litigation definitely had an effect on all of us,” said Commissioner Tony McDermott, when asked why commissioners didn’t shoot for that target in a single year.
Jenny Harbine, a lawyer with Earthjustice in Bozeman, Mont., which is handling litigation for the environmental groups, cited the 2008 federal court ruling that genetic exchange between individual populations of wolves dispersed throughout the region wasn’t adequate.
Increased mortality under state management would decrease the prospect of genetic exchange, she said.
“Hunting of an imperiled species at any level is inappropriate,” Harbine said.
