Scientists Say Feds' New Plan To Manage Red Wolves Is ‘Backward’

"Scarcely two months have passed since the Obama administration announced a major breakthrough in its program to resurrect the population of the world’s most endangered wolf.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s southeast division said in September that it had procured “the best available science” to assess the state of red wolves it managed in captivity and in eastern North Carolina, and the science showed that their genetic purity would be lost unless most of the wild wolves were captured and paired with those in zoos. It was a major blow to a 30-year effort to reintroduce an animal that once roamed the entire southeastern United States before human expansion and hunting nearly wiped them out.

But in a rebuke that conservationists called embarrassing to Fish and Wildlife, and that questions its will to move forward with a reintroduction that North Carolina land owners oppose, the four scientists who conducted the research on which the agency relied fired off a letter Tuesday saying the justification for the new plan was full of “alarming misinterpretations.”"

Darryl Fears reports for the Washington Post October 19, 2016.