
Former WDFW Commissioner Blasts Inslee On His Pressure Not To Downlist Wolves
As gray wolf attacks on livestock heat up in Northeast Washington and WDFW considers removing members of two packs, Governor Jay Inslee’s pressure on the Fish and Wildlife Commission not to downlist the species due to climate change is being raked over the coals.
Former commission member Kim Thorburn of Spokane terms his repeated directive to the citizen panel to disregard WDFW’s expert recommendation to move wolves from endangered to sensitive status just before a key vote earlier this month “cynical” and representative of his “continued interference with science- and conservation-based management of gray wolves in Washington.”

“Gray wolves are among the least vulnerable species to climate change,” she states in a letter to Inslee this week, a contention essentially backed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent status assessment of the species in the West.
Not that the Spokane birder and retired public health professional poo-poos global warming – far from it. Rather, time and effort would be better spent on actually threatened Washington wildlife, writes Thorburn.
“Many of the state’s most imperiled species are indeed losing ground because of climate change and receive far less resources for their protection and recovery than wolves, which, because of the commission’s decision to not delist, will continue to divert much needed support from other listed wildlife,” she writes. “Take, for example, greater sage-grouse and Columbian sharp-tailed grouse that have lost nearly all their remaining habitat to wildfires since 2015. Habitat restoration and recovery is time-intensive and costly, and the department must rely on partners and scraped-together resources to manage their recovery.”
In an email to this reporter, Thorburn described a recent winter habitat restoration project in Lincoln County by Spokane Audubon, the Spokane chapter of Pheasants Forever, waterfowl hunters, WDFW staffers and local landowners that she participated in and involved the planting and protective paneling of 700 trees and shrubs in a 2020 burn scar, providing “desperately” needed cover for not only sharptails but other upland birds and more wildlife.

Thorburn says if the governor cared so much about wildlife conservation and climate change, he’d focus more on controlling weeds in the state’s shrubsteppe landscapes and do more thinning and controlled burns in the woods. But instead, he’s giving off mixed signals with another recent edict.
“Furthermore, what does a state wildlife status listing mean to you?” she writes to Inslee. “You rejected the conscientiously and publicly developed Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council recommendation on the Horse Heaven wind and solar project that ensured optimal protection for the state-endangered ferruginous hawk in the face of the development. It seems hypocritical that you put pressure on the commission to sustain a completely unnecessary and scientifically unsupported endangered listing of the gray wolf while ignoring protections for a truly imperiled bird.”
It’s not the first time Thorburn has clashed with the governor, who decided not to reappoint her early last year to the Fish and Wildlife Commission. She was first named to the panel by Inslee in 2015 to fill a vacant Eastern Washington seat, then reappointed for a six-year term that ran from 2017 through 2022.
During that period and goaded by environmental groups, Inslee has directed the commission multiple times to write more shackling wolf-livestock interaction rules. The three-term governor who will be replaced this fall has also butted into cougar management.

In his July 17 letter to the commission the week of the wolf vote, Inslee argued that the “extraordinarily damaging impacts of climate change on wolf habitat” – increasing wildfires, heat waves, drought and more unstable winters – were magnifying his concerns for the species, and between future effects of those and other “pressures and uncertainties,” it wasn’t yet time to downlist.
That flies in the face of what data from the University of Washington and US Geological Survey shows, Thorburn writes in her letter.
“Since their first documented return to Washington in 2008, gray wolves have been intensively monitored, studied, and managed. These data contributed to exceptional wolf population projection modeling by the UW-based USGS Cooperative Research Unit that showed wolves are in no danger of extinction in Washington. All this information was applied to the recent wolf status review and unequivocally supported the recommendation by Department of Fish and Wildlife staff to downlist the wolf to sensitive status,” she states.
Given a chance, wolves are wildly, wildly successful animals – “the planet’s most widespread large land mammals after humans and livestock,” according to National Geographic. Indeed, led by shaggy OR-7 – itself likely the progeny of British Columbia and Alberta wolves – they have actively moved from the relatively cool Northern Rockies to hot Southern Oregon climes and even the south end of California’s scorching-hot Central Valley, reverse climate change migrants, if you will.
Sure, they might regret that decision come the dog days of August, but in all likelihood they won’t because Canis lupus is a generalist species, highly capable of ranging from Spain and Italy in western Europe through the vastness of Russia, across the land bridge into North America down to the Desert Southwest and even the Deep South, if historical records are any indication.
“There is no current evidence that climate change is causing negative effects to the viability of the gray wolf in the Western United States,” writes USFWS in the aforementioned species assessment that was published this February. “Significant changes in temperature and precipitation patterns due to climate change have already been documented within the wolf’s range in the Western United States, while the occupied range of the wolf metapopopulation has continued to expand. Gray wolves are highly adaptable and are efficient at exploiting available food resources. While uncertainty remains as to how climate change may affect wolf populations in the future, we do not expect that the flexible and adaptive nature of wolves will change.”
Climate change may somewhat impact the availability of certain ungulate populations for wolves, but not in a billion years will it affect the availability of human garbage for them, 23 percent of the diet of wolves in part of Iran and a menu item also seen in Europe and the US. They’re far, far more adaptable in many ways than advocates want you to know.
Today, gray wolves roam from sea level to as far up into the mountains as they can find any food, from Arctic pack ice down through the tundra, taiga and boreal forest, plains and prairies to the pines and pretty much anywhere where people have modified the environment to their incidental benefit through logging and habitat alterations favoring game species, and cattle and sheep ranching.
Which brings us back to those aforementioned livestock depredations in Northeast Washington, where long ago wolves eclipsed the region’s recovery goal, despite tribal hunting, federal delisting and more.
This morning, WDFW said it is considering lethally removing wolves in the Leadpoint and Dominion Packs of northern Stevens County following repeated attacks on calves over the past month.
The Dominion wolves are responsible for three dead calves and four injured ones since July 19, according to WDFW.
“WDFW staff are discussing the depredations and use of non-lethal measures in this pack territory. Staff are assessing how to most effectively address this situation moving forward and will provide a recommendation to the Director within the next few days,” an agency update states.
The Leadpoint Pack have killed one calf and injured two others, one of which subsequently died from its injuries, in a series of attack that began June 28. WDFW also reported that one yearling female wolf seen chasing livestock last week was killed.
As state staffers mull their next steps with the Leadpoints, it might be worth pointing out that earlier this month, Director Kelly Susewind declined to take out a Couse Pack wolf in Southeast Washington following four depredations because an adult male wolf in the group had already been legally shot while chasing stock. WDFW said that that could disrupt the predatory behavior of the pack and it would monitor to see if that was the case.
No further cattle losses have been reported.
But in the meanwhile, what has been lost is a sense that Washington wolves are being managed by meaningful biological benchmarks as adjudged by actual state wildlife biologists and managers in charge of recovering a species that – to borrow a phrase from the steelhead world – is highly plastic in its myriad possible lifeways.
Now it is about what is politically convenient. Inslee’s “climate change” will be the plastic parsley – remember that prescient 1980s airline commercial? “You can use it over and over again” – of excuses to keep gray wolves forever listed as state endangered in Washington while so many actually imperiled species need help.
“The state’s wondrous wildlife diversity would be far better conserved if you stopped meddling in wolf management,” Thorburn concludes in her letter to Inslee. “The environmentalist legacy that you seek would also be better served by leaving ecosystem-based wildlife conservation and management to professionals instead of radical fringe ideologues.”
And that is going to have to be all the time I have for this. A-woooooooooo!