And Then There Were Three: The Second Extermination of the Lobo

The first Mexican gray wolf pup born in the wilds of the American Southwest in nearly 50 years is dead, presumed starved to death after its mother died in August of 1998. At the time its mother perished, the pup was only four months old and was incapable of surviving on its own.

Known as wolf 174, the pup's mother was one of 11 Mexican wolves, a subspecies of the larger North American timber wolf, released into the Gila Mountains near the border between Arizona and New Mexico by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in March of 1998. At first, the government suggested that the female wolf fell victim to an attack by a mountain lion, a rare way for a wolf to die. But later an autopsy revealed that the wolf had met a more traditional end: it had been shot.

The killing of the Mexican wolf violates federal and state laws and can carry a penalty of up to $100,000 and one year in prison. Typically, however, the Fish and Wildlife Service has been reluctant to pursue these types of cases against ranchers. An infamous example is the Montana case of a rancher who shot a federally protected wolf and the government declined to prosecute the case. The rancher later ended up jailed and fined for shooting a neighbor's dog.

Wolf 174 was the fourth of the Mexican wolves to have died after being released into the wild. Since her demise, at least two others have been killed and another is missing. The deaths have not been accidental. Instead, one by one the wolves have been deliberately killed, apparent victims of a vigilante campaign by angry ranchers in the remote mountains of Arizona and New Mexico. Of the 11 original wolves, only three now remain in the wild.

The Mexican wolf, known throughout the Southwest as El Lobo, is a diminutive subspecies of the timber wolf, which inhabits the northern Rockies and the North Woods area of Minnesota and Michigan. The lobos were hunted to extinction in the wild by the 1960s. After the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1972, five lobos were captured in central Mexico and used to begin a captive breeding program. By the mid-1990s, zoos and other breeding facilities had generated 175 Mexican wolves. As a result of lawsuits by environmental groups, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service was forced to initiate a program to reintroduce the wolves into wilderness areas in eastern Arizona. Under the Mexican wolf recovery plan, the government has set a goal of having more than 100 wolves in the area by 2025.

When it was released in 1996, the government's reintroduction plan sparked fierce protests from ranchers, who lodged outlandish claims that the wolves would decimate their cattle and sheep herds. These assertions lacked any substance. Studies of wolf predation from Canada and Minnesota show that even in areas where wolves and livestock interact, wolves are reluctant to prey on domestic animals, preferring deer and elk, both of which are abundant in the Blue Mountains of Arizona. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that when more than 100 wolves have taken root in the area they will kill more than 10,000 deer and elk a year, while taking only from between one and thirty-four cows and sheep. Defenders of Wildlife has offered to compensate ranchers for any livestock losses to wolves.

The ranchers also claimed that the wolves posed a threat to humans. "We are afraid that some of these wolves are going to get ahold of one of our children," Jesse Carey recently told the Phoenix New Times. Carey is a gun shop owner and sheriff in Catron County, New Mexico, whose virulent anti-wolf rhetoric prompted federal law enforcement officials to seize guns from his shop to test against the bullets which killed the wolves.

"The notion that wolves will attack children is simply a scare tactic," says Dr. Robin Silver, a Phoenix physician and wolf advocate. "There's not one recorded instance of wild wolves preying on humans in North America. I don't think these wolves are going to change their evolutionary history."

The lobo has become the latest rallying cry for the anti-environmental movement. Despite national polls showing that more then 80% of the public supports wolf reintroduction, the antipathy for the wolf and its defenders is extreme across much of the rural west. The southwest, in particular, has long been a breeding ground for some of the most virulent strains of the Wise-Use movement. Several counties have enacted ordinances challenging the federal government's authority to manage national forest lands and protect endangered species habitat. There have been armed confrontations with federal officials and environmentalists.

In 1993, Leroy Jackson, a traditional Navajo who had challenged the decimation of his reservation's forest by a white-owned timber company, received death threats and was later found dead in his van in a remote spot in northern New Mexico under mysterious circumstances. In 1997, Santa Fe environmentalist Sam Hitt received death threats and was hung in effigy outside the offices of the organization he heads, Forest Guardians. In December of 1998, the Santa Fe offices of Animal Protection of New Mexico had its windows blown out by shotgun blasts. A group called the Minutemen claimed responsibility for the terrorist action. Police believe the attack was in retaliation of the group's support of wolf reintroduction.

One of the targets of this attack may have been Patricia Wolff, who works as a consultant for the group. Wolff has received several death threats, dating back to a 1992 incident investigated by the FBI. Wolff had recently released a tape-recording of a May 1998 conversation she had with a trapper named Jody Lee Cooper, who claimed that ranchers in Glenwood, New Mexico had wanted to hire him to kill the reintroduced wolves. Cooper, who refers to himself as "the predator's predator," said that he had been offered "$35,000 in cash to kill 'em all." Wolff took the tape to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which failed to follow up on the evidence. "I think he was truthful and credible," Wolff says. "He had no motive to lie to me."

This spring 15 more wolves are scheduled to be released. The new wolves will be spray-painted orange, supposedly to differentiate them from coyotes, who ranchers can legally kill. But in fact this glow-in-the-dark marking may just make the animals easier targets for the lobo killers.