CASPER, Wyo. – Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal is steamed over how federal courts have handled wildlife questions affecting his state.
Freudenthal says that disputes over the federal Endangered Species Act should be litigated in Wyoming when they affect Wyoming wildlife.
Freudenthal told the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in Casper that environmental activists are filing lawsuits to step up animal protections in Montana and Idaho, not Wyoming, in hopes of getting a judge friendlier to their side.
The governor said that environmental groups file lawsuits where they suspect they’ll get judges “who rule how environmental groups want them to.”
A Montana judge, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy, is currently considering a lawsuit filed by 13 conservation and wildlife groups over whether wolves can be removed from federal protection in Montana and Idaho yet remain protected in Wyoming.
Molloy also ordered last year that grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone area be returned to federal protection.
And in Idaho, U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill in 2007 ordered a 12-month review of whether an Endangered Species Act listing was warranted for the sage grouse. Winmill ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2005 decision against protecting the sage grouse was inappropriately influenced by politics and not based on science.
The agency this year found that sage grouse protection is warranted but precluded by other priorities.
Freudenthal said federal law should be changed to require that litigation is handled in the “district at issue.” Such legislation was proposed in 2004 for the late Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas, a Republican. It didn’t pass.
The governor’s comments sparked a sharp response from an attorney with Earthjustice in Bozeman, Mont., one of the plaintiffs in the wolf litigation.
“To hear him tell it, you would think wolves only exist in Wyoming, and that Wyoming should have the first crack at deciding the fate of any resource in the entire region,” Jenny Harbine told the Casper Star-Tribune.
“But the truth of the matter is that wolves exist in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, and Wyoming hasn’t cornered the market on judicial resolution of the conservation issues.”
While Molloy considers whether to restore federal protection for wolves in Idaho and Montana, a lawsuit filed by Wyoming in U.S. District Court in Cheyenne seeks to force the federal government to accept the state’s wolf management plan and delist wolves here.
The federal government has rejected the state plan, which would classify wolves as a trophy game species for licensed hunters in the state’s northwest corner while classifying them as a predator species in the rest of the state, meaning anybody could shoot them at any time.