Gray Wolves May Lose Endangered Status, But Not Without a Fight

WASHINGTON — In passionate and at times tearful testimony at the U.S. Department of the Interior Monday night (Sept. 30), Americans who say they have admired, studied, defended and even kissed gray wolves offered a plea to federal officials: Don't take the animals off the endangered species list.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to lift federal protections for all gray wolves in the continental United States, except for a struggling population of a subspecies, Mexican wolves, found in the Southwest. The agency argues the threat of extinction has been eliminated; wolves' numbers have bounced back to healthy levels and have even surged beyond recovery goals.

But critics, including several biologists, say the move is premature. They are concerned that the proposal would result in more aggressive management tactics and hunting policies, and could hurt the species' chances of recolonizing other parts of their historic range. Some scientists wonder if the battle raging over wolves stems from greater confusion about how to define recovery and deal with threatened wildlife in the United States — especially species as storied and controversial as the wolf.

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America's Fleeting Chance to Correct Chimps' Endangered Status (Op-Ed)

Brian Hare is director of the Ape Research Consortium and an associate professor in Evolutionary Anthropology at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. Vanessa Woods is the author of Bonobo Handshake and is a research scientist at Duke University. Hare and Woods contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

These young chimps were captured as part of the

 illegal trade in great apes. Such crimes remove 3,000

 critically endangered great apes from the wild each year.

Credit: Debby Cox, Jane Goodall Institute

Chimpanzees are the only endangered species denied full protection under the endangered species act. When chimpanzees living in Africa were recognized as an endangered species in the late 1980s, the biomedical community successfully lobbied to prevent captive chimpanzees living in the United States from receiving that new protection.

This week, we have a chance to finally fix that injustice. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has asked for public comment until Aug. 12 on whether the United States should provide protection to all chimpanzees under the endangered species act.

America fell in love with chimpanzees as a result of the pioneering research of Jane Goodall. Through private and public support, Americans became the major force protecting wild chimpanzees in Africa as well as captive chimpanzees in the United States. With this support, three generations of researchers have followed in Goodall's footsteps. These researchers have revealed exactly how similar the social lives of wild chimpanzees are to our own, how complex the problems are that chimpanzees can solve and what this all means for our own species' place in nature.

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