Sen. Burns Wants Funds For Wolf Recovery Cut

Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., failed to keep wolves from being reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, but now he hopes to stop the funding for the federal reintroduction program.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expects to spend $6.7 million bringing wolves to the two areas over the next seven years.

The wildlife agency, the National Park Service and other agencies spent nearly $6 million on the program from 1973 to 1994, project leader Ed Bangs estimated.

The high cost of wolf recovery has been a “major concern of people in the full spectrum of opinion,” Bangs said.

Burns is to the point on money: “They ain’t gonna get no more.”

Hank Fischer of Defenders of Wildlife, author of a new book on the restoration of wolves to Yellowstone, said wolf opponents made the process more expensive than needed.

“It got so expensive because people like Conrad Burns have delayed this at every turn,” Fischer said. “The opponents made it cost five times what it would have otherwise.”

Much of the budget will be spent on monitoring wolves so they can be killed or captured quickly if they kill livestock. An environmental impact statement also took several years to write because of the controversy, Fischer said.

“This EIS could have been done five years ago, and we would be near recovery if we hadn’t had these delays from Conrad and the Wyoming delegation,” Fischer said.

Republican Senate leaders introduced a budget plan Tuesday aimed at reducing federal spending by $1 trillion over the next seven years. Details of comparatively minor elements like wolf recovery will not be worked out for some time yet.