Endangered species around North America, including grizzly and polar bears, orcas, humpback whales, bats, wolves, and wolverines, are facing new threats every day.
Several legal initiatives have been proposed that would strip vital protections from numerous imperiled species across the United States. If these damaging plans succeed, we may soon see the legal killing of grizzly bears in areas in which they were previously protected, more injuries and deaths of marine mammals from fishing industry practices, ignoring science when making listing decisions for the Endangered Species Act, and gray wolves once again being denied legal protection from harm.
The Endangered Species Act Is Highly Effective but Continuously under Attack
The Endangered Species Act (ESA), signed into law in 1973, protects more than 1,500 species in the U.S. This foundational law is effective, and essential to the management and protection of threatened animals across the country. It has also helped save some of the nation’s most fragile species from extinction, including bald eagles, peregrine falcons, manatees, sea turtles, black-footed ferrets, and southern sea otters.
The necessity of the ESA has been confirmed repeatedly in the past. Policy changes like those being proposed now in 2025 have been enacted previously, requiring little to no scientific evidence to remove protections from imperiled animals, and lead to negative consequences. For example, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) has been sued for removing species threatened with extinction from legal protection from the ESA (also referred to as “delisting”) that the best available scientific evidence indicated needed those legal protection for survival. Some examples of species that became delisted without or contrary to proper scientific support included wolves, northern spotted owls, red tree voles, bison, and grizzly bears, among others.
Wolves: A Case Study in the Importance of the Endangered Species Act
Wolves are perhaps the most prominent example of how both implementing and stripping protections can impact animal populations. Before they were heavily hunted in the 1900s, a quarter of a million wolves were thriving in the U.S. Following the arrival of European settlers, unregulated wolf hunting resulted in a sharp population decline and severely isolated populations. But, when wolves were listed as Endangered and given protection through the ESA in 1974, their numbers began to recover.
Unfortunately, the wolf population recovery was short-lived; in 2011, Congress delisted gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountain states, signifying the first time a legislative body had delisted a species and opened the door to subsequent species delisting this way. In 2019, the Trump administration delisted gray wolves nationwide. Directly following the delisting, more than 200 wolves were killed in just 60 hours in one of the first hunts after wolf protections were removed.
“…More than 200 wolves were killed in just 60 hours in one of the first hunts after wolf protections were removed.”
Further contributing to this population ravage, controversial laws in some states allowed the slaughtering of up to 90% of wolf populations, even permitting extreme slaughtering methods like snares and killing for bounties. As a result, the decision to delist wolves motivated anti-wolf groups to unleash unimaginable cruelty in their efforts to kill wolves. Fortunately, in 2022, a federal judge ultimately found that the delisting that occurred during the Trump administration was not supported by science and reversed the wolf delisting. Unfortunately, the USFWS did not, however, make any changes to the legal status of gray wolves living in the Northern Rocky Mountains, whose management remains up to the individual states in this area. States in the Northern Rocky Mountains (i.e., Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming) have continued to manage wolves and wolf harvest (including hunting and trapping) according to state laws and respective gray wolf management plans.
We Must Defend the Endangered Species Act from Current Attacks
It is vital that we act now to stop this assault on wildlife before we witness the same loss that occurred with wolves with other animals.
Speak Out for Wildlife
Help prevent plans that would weaken wildlife protections by contacting your U.S. Representative today to ensure that protections for imperiled wildlife are maintained.
Defend Endangered Species
You can also join us in helping save these amazing animals by becoming an Endangered Species Defender.
The proposed changes will be devastating to species and will hasten their approach toward extinction. Making these changes will also solidify a harmful transition from believing that we must protect animals from the harm that humans have largely caused to believing that land and animals exist solely for human use, and if they do not benefit us, that we can and should eliminate them.
Act now if you do not want to live in a world that rewards destruction and death and denounces coexistence.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Devan
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The Born Free USA Team
Dear Reader,