Wildlife advocates are leading a call for a boycott of an entire state over the actions of one man.
If the advocates have their way, tourists will have to skip visiting Wyoming–also known as the Cowboy State–this summer, and that includes Yellowstone National Park, and Grand Teton National Park, two of the most stunning natural wonders in the world.
The controversy started when a man struck a wolf with a snowmobile, taped its mouth shut and went out to show it off to his fellow hunters in a Sublette County bar before killing it.
The animal activists decry such cruelty and maintain that the conservative state—where hunting is a major activity–has enabled such cruelty through lax laws on wolf management.
But a leader of the state’s stock growers association said it’s an isolated incident and unrelated to the state’s wolf management laws. The laws that have been in place for more than a decade are designed to prevent the predators from proliferating out of the mountainous Yellowstone region and into other areas where ranchers run cattle and sheep.
“This was an abusive action. None of us condone it. It never should have been done,” said Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and a Sublette County rancher who has lost sheep to wolves. “It’s gotten a lot of media attention but it’s not exemplary of how we manage wolves to deal with livestock issues or anything.”
Wolves are federally protected as an endangered or threatened species in most of the U.S. but not the Northern Rockies. Wyoming, Idaho and Montana allow wolves to be hunted and trapped, after their numbers rebounded following their reintroduction to Yellowstone and central Idaho almost 30 years ago. Before their reintroduction, wolves had been annihilated in the lower 48 states through government-sponsored poisoning, trapping and bounty hunting into the mid-1900s.
Today, while Wyoming has the least restrictive policies for killing wolves, there are still limits on hunting and trapping in the northwestern corner of the state and killing them is prohibited in Yellowstone and neighboring Grand Teton National Park, where they are a major attraction for millions of tourists. But outside the Yellowstone region, in the 85% of the state known as the “predator zone,” they can be freely killed.
The wolf at the center of this controversy was killed within the predator zone.
Tourism is a major industry and source of revenue for Wyoming, but so are ranching and agriculture, and attitudes towards wildlife in the harsh environment is often conditioned by the need to protect livestock. Losses to wolves can be devastating to individual ranchers who are often already teetering on the brink of financial collapse.
Saharai Salazar, a Santa Rosa dog trainer, is among out-of-staters changing their travel plans based on what allegedly happened Feb. 29 near Daniel, a western Wyoming town of about 150 people. Posting on the state’s tourism Instagram account, she stated that she would not get married in Wyoming next year as planned. The post was among hundreds of similar comments, many with a #boycottwyoming hashtag on social media in recent weeks.
“We have to change the legislation, rewrite the laws so we can offer more protection, so they can’t be interpreted in ways that will allow for such atrocities,” Salazar said in an interview.
Wolf expert and former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wolf biologist Ed Bangs, called the controversy a “side show” to the species’ successful recovery.
The Sublette County Sheriff’s Office said it has been investigating the anonymous reports of the man’s actions but has struggled to get witnesses to come forward.
