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Time-sensitive • The House could vote any day
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Weyerhaeuser, Wisconsin — a 65-pound collared female. A research animal, tracked for years. Is this best available science?
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A message from Melissa Smith
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Wisconsin’s wolves could lose every protection within weeks.
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I need you to read this today, because we may be out of time. A bill in Congress — H.R. 9171 — would strip gray wolves of federal protection across the lower 48 states. It cleared committee on June 3. It is on the U.S. House floor calendar right now, and the vote could come any day. It carries 21 anti-wildlife riders — the most ever packed into a single bill in the 52-year history of the Endangered Species Act.
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And the moment it passes, the killing here is not a possibility. It is a plan already drawn. Our own Wisconsin DNR is not waiting — its Wolf Advisory Committee is meeting now to lay out the next hunt: the zones, the quotas, and a season split between trappers and hounders. The agency that is supposed to protect these animals is drafting the hunt that federal delisting would unleash. We have seen where this goes. The last time a hunt opened, hunters and hounders killed 218 wolves in a single weekend — far past the state’s own limit — before anyone could stop it. Next time, there will be no federal floor to stop at.
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Six men, a pack of hounds, and a dead wolf in bloodied snow. Is this conservation?
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The DNR’s own records tell the truth about “conflict.” In all of 2025, the agency paid just 60 verified wolf-damage claims in the entire state. Sixty. That is the problem they say they are solving by killing wolves by the hundred. The 2021 hunt did not go after problem animals — it killed wolves wherever the dogs could run them down. This was never conflict management. It was a body count.
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And this is the mindset we are up against. One Wisconsin hound hunter put it in writing, in public:
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“It’s cheaper to feed the dogs than to buy bullets — so let the dogs kill it.”
— posted publicly by a Wisconsin hound hunter
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A dead wolf, posed for a guide service. A business. In Wisconsin. Is this ethics?
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Not science. Not conservation. Not ethics.
This is state management.
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“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.”
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I wish wanting it were enough. It is not. Holding these agencies to the law takes lawyers. Replacing the wolf research the federal government just shut down on our border takes scientists. Turning quiet Wisconsinites into a wall this Board cannot ignore takes outreach that costs real money to run. We are a 100% volunteer organization. There are no salaries here. Every single dollar you give goes straight into the fight.
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Speakforwildlife.org/donate
What your gift pays for today
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| The lawyers holding the DNR to the law — our petition, our litigation, the accountability no one else is forcing. |
| The science the feds abandoned — independent monitoring now that the federal research stations near our border have gone dark. |
| The voices — the billboards, the organizing, the outreach that proves to the Board that Wisconsin is watching. |
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The wolves cannot call their representatives. They cannot hire a lawyer. They cannot sit in that DNR meeting and say no. We are the only voice they have — and the time to use it is now, before the vote, not after.
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For the wild,
Melissa Smith
Founder & Executive Director
Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance • Speak for Wildlife
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Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance is a 100% volunteer 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
117 Ardmore Drive, Madison, WI 53713 • speakforwildlife.org
Your gift is tax-deductible to the full extent allowed by law.
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