From the desk of Melissa Smith, Executive Director — Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance
He’s not the exception. He’s just the one who got filmed.
Dear Friend,
I remember exactly where I was.
I was the first person in the wolf advocacy world to find the story. I read it and my body rejected it before my mind could catch up. I got physically sick.
A man named Cody Roberts had chased a young wolf across the Wyoming snow with a snowmobile, running her down again and again until she couldn’t stand. Then he taped her mouth shut. Threw her in his truck. Took her home — where his dogs attacked her while he watched and laughed. Then he took a nap. Ate dinner. Woke up, checked to see if she was still alive, called some buddies, and took her — half-dead, broken, terrified — to a bar.
A bar.
Where more than twenty people watched. Laughed. Posed for photos. The wolf lay on the floor and could not get up.
Then he carried her outside like a baby, and shot her.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department called it hunting. They fined him $250.
I have spent my entire adult life in this fight. I have seen things that would break most people. But I have never — not once — felt rage and grief arrive simultaneously like a physical blow the way they did that day. Because I knew in my bones what I was looking at.
This was not one deranged man in Wyoming.
This was Tuesday.
This past Thursday, March 5, 2026, Cody Roberts stood before a judge and said two words:
And then: “I apologize.”
Two years of sustained, relentless, global outrage. Two years of people like you refusing to scroll past, refusing to accept a $250 fine as justice, flooding phone lines and inboxes until a local prosecutor with a conscience convened a grand jury. And this week, for the first time in American history, a man was convicted of felony animal cruelty for killing a wolf.
That happened because people like you refused to let it die.
Let me be honest with you, because you deserve that.
Part of me is still angry. The plea deal calls for 18 months of probation and a $1,000 fine. No prison. Roberts gets to go home to his family. Tunkan — the name the Lakota people gave her — doesn’t get to go home to hers. Some have called it a sweetheart deal. I understand why.
And I’ll tell you something else that’s hard to say: there are real questions about whether a jury of local hunters in Sublette County, Wyoming would have convicted him at all. Because in Wyoming — in most of America — wolves are classified as predators, and predators are explicitly exempt from animal cruelty laws. Wyoming’s own Game and Fish Department looked at everything Cody Roberts did and said it wasn’t a crime. The system was not broken. It was working exactly the way it was built to work.
So yes. I am angry. I am still not sleeping. And I refuse to pretend that probation and a fine is justice for Tunkan.
But here is why this still matters — why I need you to hold both things at once.
For the first time in American history, a man was charged with felony animal cruelty for killing a wolf — and he pled guilty. That plea is on the record. That precedent exists. The next prosecutor in the next state who wants to go after the next Cody Roberts now has something to point to. That is a door that was sealed shut, now open by a crack.
The Wyoming Legislature also passed a new law explicitly extending cruelty protections to predators — a direct result of this case and the pressure that followed. Roberts lost his right to own a gun. In Wyoming, a wildlife advocate told the court, that is enormous. He is a felon now. That matters in a culture where it matters deeply.
The fight now is to make wildlife cruelty protections the law everywhere — not just in the rare county with a prosecutor willing to take it on. It is not enough. It is also something. And we are not done.
Now. Let me tell you about Wisconsin.
While the world was watching Wyoming, this was happening right here.
A 36-year-old woman named Jessica Kroening and three 16-year-old boys — one of them her own son — spent over a year terrorizing wildlife across three Wisconsin counties. Fond du Lac. Washington. Dodge. A 200-square-mile killing ground.
They drove at night with spotlights, shooting deer from the vehicle. They deliberately struck deer with their car, then pulled the wounded animals — still alive, still suffering — out of the trunk to take selfies. One video shows them carrying a deer inside their home, the animal clearly in agony, while they walked around it. More than 100 deer. Geese. Raccoons. Possums. Turtles. All of it for sport. Most of the deer left to rot where they fell.
The media called it poaching.
It was not poaching. It was torture.
Poaching is taking wildlife illegally. What these people did — the deliberate infliction of suffering, the selfies with dying animals, the joy of it — that is cruelty. And in Wisconsin, as in all 50 states, wildlife has no legal protection from cruelty. So the charges? Mostly civil DNR violations. Fines. The same machinery that gave Cody Roberts $250 grinds on, right here, in our own backyard, every single week.
We know of at least ten cases like this in Wisconsin every year. Every year. You don’t see them in the paper because they’re labeled poaching and resolved with a fine. The cruelty is invisible — buried in bureaucratic language, shielded by a legal system that was designed to protect hunters, not animals.
And then there are the killing contests.
We have documented over 400 wildlife killing contests in Wisconsin. Events where participants compete to kill the most coyotes, foxes, raccoons — for prizes, for trophies, for fun. Animals killed not for food, not for management, but for sport. For the thrill of the number. For the photo at the end.
Tell me how that is different from what happened in that bar in Daniel, Wyoming.
Tell me how 218 wolves killed in 63 hours with hounds and bait and bone-crushing traps — pregnant females, nursing mothers, bonded pairs — is different from what Jessica Kroening and those boys did to deer in Fond du Lac County.
The answer is: it isn’t. The only difference is the uniform. One wears camouflage and a license. The other drives a spotlight at night. The cruelty is the same. The law protects both of them equally.
No religion on earth sanctions this. Not Christianity. Not Islam. Not Judaism. Not the indigenous traditions that gave Tunkan her name. This is not heritage. This is not culture. This is a failure of the human soul, dressed in camouflage and protected by statute.
If someone pushes back, ask them one question: Would you do it to your dog?
Then ask them why the law says it’s different.
This is what Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance is going to change.
We are going to make wildlife subject to cruelty protections. We are going to make sure that what Cody Roberts did, what Jessica Kroening did, what happens in 400 killing contests every year in this state — is prosecutable as the cruelty it is. Not a fine. Not a civil DNR violation. A crime.
We document it when no one else will. We litigate when no one else can. We name the bad actors when no one else dares. We just stopped Wisconsin’s wolf hunt this winter — no quota, no massacre, no bodies in the snow — because of years of endless pressure, endlessly applied.
Read how we documented the 2021 hunt — 218 wolves, sworn affidavits, the full picture — in our white paper: speakforwildlife.org/white-paper
We accept no corporate money. No conditional grants. No one tells us what we can and cannot say. That means we can say what the big organizations won’t:
Wolf hunting is cruelty. Killing contests are cruelty. Running a deer down with your car and carrying it inside for a selfie is cruelty. All of it is cruelty. And it has to end.
Whatever you give today funds the litigation, the testimony, the investigations, and the advocacy that makes moments like Thursday’s guilty plea possible — and then pushes further, into the law itself, until wildlife has the protection every living creature deserves.
For Tunkan. For the 218. For the deer in the trunk in Fond du Lac County. For every animal whose suffering was filed away as a poaching citation and forgotten.
Their lives mattered. We are going to make the law say so.
With grief, with rage, and with absolute refusal to quit —
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