Rare wolf faces hard road to recovery

Most people are familiar with the gray wolf, which was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, and has since established populations in several Western states. But there’s an endangered wolf subspecies not often written about—the Mexican wolf, smallest of the gray wolves. Also called “El Lobo,” it’s native to America’s Southwest and Mexico.

Just 286 wild lobos roam Arizona and New Mexico, and perhaps 35 inhabit Mexico, while 350 are in captivity. Humans have nearly wiped these wolves out.

Irrational wolf hatred hampers recovery, that hatred issuing from people who want to control public land, and from some hunters, outfitters and ranchers. For example, last April, the Catron County Commission, a loud voice for private control of public lands, unanimously passed a resolution proclaiming a lobo “emergency.”

The commission has been declaring lobo “emergencies” since 2006, when fewer than two dozen lobos populated the entire Southwest.

Audrey McQueen, a New Mexico Catron County Commissioner, hunting outfitter and board chair of the County Livestock Authority, was quoted by Outdoor Life magazine as follows: “We are scared. We’ve had deputies posted at the school this year so our kids can go out and play.”

There’s no record of lobos ever attacking humans. Kids face more danger from poodles.

McQueen also complained that Mexican wolves have “changed (elk) behavior.” Translation: Elk now act like elk, fleeing when hunters stop their trucks. The biological problem facing all living lobos is that they are descended from just seven survivors, making inbreeding a concern. If they lose the protection of the Endangered Species Act, their populations will continue to diminish and inbreeding will increase. Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican, has already introduced an “Enhancing Safety for Animals” bill that would remove Endangered Species Act protection for lobos.

Until 2023, lobos were thought to have mostly escaped the genetic damage of inbreeding. But that year, Greta Anderson of the Western Watersheds Project learned from a public-records request that conjoined toe pads, called “syndactyly”—a symptom of severe inbreeding in canids—was seen on the carcass of a captive lobo raised in this country and released in Mexico.

Now that researchers are looking for syndactyly, they’re finding it in both wild and captive lobos. A solution, Anderson explained, would be letting lobos occupy the northern part of their natural range where a few could hybridize with northern gray wolves, as they did historically. A new shot of northern gray wolf genes in the lobo population would relieve the genetic bottleneck.

But a federal recovery plan imposes an artificial boundary—Interstate 40, which slices off the top third of Arizona and New Mexico. Whenever possible, all lobos that cross to the north are returned to the south. This boundary, insisted on by the two state wildlife agencies, is making true recovery impossible.

South of I-40, lobos are classified as a “non-essential experimental population,” meaning it’s fine for managers to kill them if they are deemed problematic. It’s only north of I-40 that lobos are fully protected as “endangered.”

A draft recovery plan prescribed three U.S. subpopulations, each with at least 200 lobos: one south of I-40, two north. But then-Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican, wrote an editorial excoriating the plan, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ran for cover.

The current plan prescribes only a single subpopulation of 320 lobos, all south of I-40, and a subpopulation of 200 in Mexico. The Mexican subpopulation is a fantasy.

There’s scant public land in Mexico, and ranchers there still poison wolves. Biologist David Parsons of the Rewilding Institute led lobo recovery from 1990 to 1999. “We’re not paying attention to the best available science required by the Endangered Species Act,” he said. “This artificial boundary precludes expansion (and) Mexican wolves remain at risk of extinction.”

The current practice of cross-fostering lobos—placing captive-bred pups in dens to be raised by wild wolves—would work if lobos had decent genetic diversity. But pups take two years to reach sexual maturity, and mortality is naturally high in the wild.

That’s why Anderson, Parsons and other wolf allies advocate adult pack releases.

“Cross-fostering is a tool in the toolbox, but it’s very slow and very labor-intensive,” said Anderson. “And some of the (parent) wolves are being used over and over again, sending basically the same genetic content into the wild.”

Meanwhile, wolf haters are shooting lobos on both sides of I-40.

Ted Williams, a longtime environmental writer, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.