By Rachael Woodhouse
GCN Live.com

It’s the call of the wild.

The Department of The Interior and a majority of environmental groups, who are suing the Fish and Wildlife Service over wolf management, plan to settle ongoing litigation. This could lead to delisting wolves from the Endangered Species Act. If the Fish and Wildlife Service is able to negotiate a management plan with Wyoming, then it could also lead to delisting wolves in the Cowboy State and all of the northern Rocky Mountains.

U.S. Senators Mike Enzi and John Barrasso, both R-Wyo., want Wyoming to have equal footing in the delisting process.

Enzi was pleased the Department of Interior and some environmental groups, who have agreed not to file more lawsuits to block the proposal, acknowledged that the wolf is recovered in the Rocky Mountain Region.

The fight has been ongoing for years. As a news reporter in Wyoming from 2006-2009, I followed the wolf issue and wrote about the twists and turns extensively.

Canadian grey wolves were re-introduced into Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s, pushed forward in large part by the Sierra Club, to save the native Yellowstone wolf, which had been listed as an endangered species. Never mind that the Canadian grey wolf is a different wolf species. The result? The Endangered Species Act wound up eradicating, not preserving, the unique DNA of the Yellowstone canids through interbreeding with the grey wolf.

Nowadays, in Yellowstone, the so-called “Grey” wolf (a Yellowstone/Yukon hybrid) ranges in beautiful colors from snow white to coal black and everything in between – and their numbers have grown exponentially. So much so, that they surpassed the original number goals set by the Environmental Protection Agency nearly a decade ago. The result has been a beautiful yet predatory animal set loose in the middle of American’s ranching country, ravaging livestock, costing ranchers millions of dollars in lost revenue, and a threat to private property rights for anyone living in grey wolf territory.

Though the range of the grey wolf extends from as far North as the Yukon Territory to as South as Arizona, and as far West as Idaho to as far East as Michigan, the three states who share Yellowstone National Park – Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming – have stood the most to lose, and have led the fight to delist the species.

One solution, proposed in 2008, designated two specific land areas known as trophy zones and predator zones. As I wrote for KTWO at the time:

A reimbursement program is in place in the trophy game zones. Stock growers are eligible for reimbursement on adult yearling cattle and horses on a one-to-one basis, based on the animal’s market value. For calves and sheep, they are eligible for up to seven times the current value of the animal.

But for anyone living in the designated predatory zone, the plan presented a problem:

The [Wyoming] Game and Fish Department does not offer wolf predation reimbursements in the predator zone.

That meant that ranchers whose land was in the predator zone would receive no government reimbursements for lost head of cattle due to wolf predations. The only exception to this is on Indian reservations, which are sovereign nations.

Meanwhile, the court case “Defenders of Wildlife Et Al V. Hall Et Al” was making the news from a bitter battle in Montana district court.

What makes the issue so complicated is the fact that the battle is being waged on both the federal and state level, and the states affected don’t always see eye to eye on the way to deal with the issue.

Also, wolves are nomadic creatures. They don’t live in any one state; the same wolf can travel hundreds of miles in short periods of time. Wolves tagged in Yellowstone have been found in southern Utah.

Ultimately, many legislators feel that the only way to get the issue resolved once and for all, in a way that makes both property owners and environmentalists happy, is to see a federal decision.

As U.S. Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) stated to the press just days ago, “I believe that the best way to ensure the success of any negotiation is to back it up with the force of law. That is why I continue to support national delisting of the gray wolf. I won’t rest until Wyoming sees a complete delisting of the wolf and its management returned to our state’s on-the-ground wildlife experts.”