Once the new federal budget, which has already been passed by the House of Representatives, makes it through the Senate and across the President's desk, a familiar animal species will have undergone an identity change: in the western United States, the gray wolf will no longer be endangered.
Before humans got involved, gray wolves ranged all over North America:
Then we hunted them until their range looked like this:
In 1978, on the brink of extinction, the gray wolf was listed as endangered in the lower 48 states. The one exception was in Minnesota, where it was only "threatened." (See that gray spot?) We stopped hunting them and started trying to save them instead.
In the mid-1990s, small populations of gray wolves were reintroduced in the Southwest and in Yellowstone National Park. The Yellowstone population began as just 66 animals captured in Canada. The reintroduction was controversial, but today the ...
