Speak for Wildlife · Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf & Wildlife

65%. That’s the Number That Should End the “Recovered” Argument.

A new study tracked 608 collared wolves across the Great Lakes. It found that people are killing most of them — and that the single biggest cause of death is illegal.

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Every time we petition to protect Wisconsin’s wolves, the agency answers the same way: the population is “recovered,” “stable,” “secure.” A new peer-reviewed study just put a number on what’s actually killing them — and it doesn’t look like recovery. It looks like a population being held down by human hands.

Researchers from Michigan State University and their collaborators analyzed GPS-collar and mortality data from 608 wolves across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, spanning 2010 to 2023. Their finding is the clearest picture we’ve had of how Great Lakes wolves die:

Read that middle number again. Illegal killing — poaching — is the single leading cause of death for wolves in the Great Lakes. Not disease. Not starvation. Not cars. Poaching: shootings, poisonings, and trapping, confirmed and suspected. It kills more wolves than any other cause on the list.

A species can’t be “fully recovered and ready to hunt” and simultaneously be dying mostly at the hands of people, with illegal killing leading the way. Those two stories can’t both be true.

And here’s what makes it worse: other research shows these numbers are almost certainly an undercount. Poachers hide what they do. When a collared wolf simply vanishes, that loss skews toward illegal killing — what scientists call “cryptic poaching.” So 38% is the floor, not the ceiling. The real toll is hidden in the wolves we never find. Cutting the very monitoring that tracks them only widens that blind spot.

This is why we fight poaching — and how

Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance sits on the edge of this problem on purpose. Poaching is the leading killer of our wolves, and it thrives on exactly one thing: the expectation that no one will be held accountable. We work to break that expectation. Here’s where your dollars go:

• Pressuring the agency to enforce the law. Wildlife laws on the books mean nothing if the DNR won’t investigate and act. We push, document, and make non-enforcement visible.
• Driving real prosecution. We press district attorneys to treat wildlife crime as crime — and we’re campaigning for a dedicated statewide wildlife-crime prosecutor, so these cases stop falling through the cracks of overloaded local offices.
• Reporting and building the record. We gather and report cases, file the records requests, and keep the evidence that turns “rumors of poaching” into documented patterns.
• Our decoy wolf. We’re working to get our decoy-wolf program activated this year — a proven tool for catching poachers in the act and putting real consequences behind the law.

Source: Michigan State University study of wolf cause-of-death across Minnesota, Wisconsin & Michigan (608 collared wolves, 2010–2023), as reported by Great Lakes Echo and MSU’s Spartan Newsroom, 2026. Undercount/cryptic-poaching context: Treves et al., Journal of Mammalogy.

Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance · speakforwildlife.org · A 100% volunteer 501(c)(3). Share this. Forward it. Defend the pack.