Michael J. Robinson, Illustrated Talk: Will Science or Politics Determine the Future of the Mexican Gray Wolf?

The Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities is proud to present an Illustrated talk by Michael J. Robinson Thursday, October 17, 2024, at 5:30 pm Dane Smith Hall, Room 123. The talk is co-sponsored by the Museum of Southwestern Biology and the New Mexico BioPark Society.

Beginning in 1915, the federal government trapped and poisoned wolves on behalf of the livestock industry, eliminating wolves entirely from the western U.S. by 1945. Five years later the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service even began to poison wolves in Mexico, in a perverse program of foreign aid.

Passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 ended the policy of wolf extermination, prompted scientific captive-breeding of the descendants of seven surviving Mexican gray wolves, and enabled a successful conservationist lawsuit that led to the 1998 reintroduction of Mexican wolves in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.
Tragically, federal mismanagement of the reintroduced population has recklessly reduced the genetic heritage from those last seven wolves to the equivalent of just two wolves’ genetics, causing inbreeding and attendant physiological and reproductive harms.
The non-profit Center for Biological Diversity seeks to increase genetic diversity through a resumption in the releases of captive-born wolf families to the wild, a restoration of natural connectivity between Mexican wolves and northern wolves, and an end to wolf killings. However, the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to undermine the future of the Mexican wolf. The judiciary, elected officials and the public will help to determine whether Mexican wolf management will follow peer-reviewed conservation science or brutal cattle-industry politics.

Michael Robinson is a senior conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity and author of Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West (University Press of Colorado, 2005).