http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/wolves_on_the_west_coast/
BACKGROUND: WOLVES IN CALIFORNIA
Contacts: Noah Greenwald and Amaroq Weiss
WOLVES ON THE WEST COAST
Wolves were once common along the West Coast, from the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state through Oregon to the far reaches of Southern California. As keystone predators, wolves play a vital role in regulating prey populations like deer and elk, and in so doing benefit a host of species. By forcing elk to move more, for example, wolves have sometimes been found to increase streamside vegetation and, along with it, beaver and songbird populations.
Decades of extermination programs to appease the livestock industry drove wolves out of West Coast states in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The last wild wolf was documented in California in 1924, when it was shot in Lassen County. The last breeding wolves in Washington were eliminated in the 1930s, and in Oregon the last wolf was killed for a bounty in 1946.
Today the West Coast is a region crucial to wolf recovery. As wolf populations have expanded in the northern Rocky Mountains, the animals have moved west. As these populations reach new areas, they need state and federal protections to ensure they aren’t exterminated again. In fact, when a wild wolf called OR-7, or “Journey,” reached California in late 2011, ranchers quickly called for a “shield” to block the entrance of other wolves; some even vowed to shoot wolves on sight.
That’s why the Center for Biological Diversity and allies petitioned California to protect wolves under the state Endangered Species Act and, in June 2014, the California Fish and Game Commission voted to grant our petition. Those protections were extremely timely because only one year later, California’s first known wolf family, the Shasta pack, was confirmed in the state.
But there’s still a vast amount of work to be done for West Coast wolves. Although wolf recovery efforts in the northern Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes have met with success, wolves in the lower 48 states still occupy less than 10 percent of their historic habitat. Yet the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has stated it intends to remove federal protections for wolves in the lower 48 states, including the West Coast. If the United States is going to continue recovering its wolf population — and if it wants to retain authentic wilderness within its borders — then it needs the West Coast, which is one of the best places for wolf recovery with plenty of suitable wolf habitat and a largely supportive human population.
In August 2012 the Center and 23 other conservation organizations sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking for continued Endangered Species Act protection for wolves in the Pacific Northwest. As a founding member of the Pacific Wolf Coalition, the Center is working with conservation groups across the region to ensure that wolves retain needed protections at the state and federal level.