The red wolf is a ghost of the Southeast. A long‑legged predator that once roamed from Texas to the Atlantic Coast, only a small number survive in the wild today, the result of a decades-long reintroduction effort among swamps and pine forests of eastern North Carolina. The endangered canines are shy and rarely seen, but their presence sparks deep controversy.
Now, environmental groups are suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in an effort to declare this struggling reintroduced population “essential” to the species’ survival. On the surface, how to label the red wolves might seem like a purely legal or academic argument. In reality, changing the population’s designation would set a dangerous precedent that would undermine the very incentives needed for local communities and private landowners to help — or at the very least not oppose — reintroductions of endangered species.
The legal determination of whether a population is essential should be determined once, before any reintroduction of endangered species. Moving the goalposts after the fact risks alienating locals and undermining reintroductions.
Private landowners provide most of the habitat for endangered species, and roughly two‑thirds of all at‑risk wildlife depend on private lands. Yet current endangered species rules often treat landowners as obstacles rather than allies. When a protected animal shows up, landowners can face strict regulations, costly delays, and the risk of enforcement actions. This can discourage landowners from accommodating rare species, making them more likely to — preemptively remove habitat, or even keep quiet when members of a protected species end up killed as a way to avoid government intrusion.
The red wolves in North Carolina are a quintessential example. Beginning in the late 1980s, federal officials reintroduced the species to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, a federally managed area in the eastern part of the state. But the wolves soon ranged beyond the refuge, roaming and denning across a patchwork of public and private property. When affected landowners raised concerns, they were often met with top-down restrictions rather than cooperative solutions. As trust eroded, gunshots became a leading cause of death for reintroduced red wolves. Instead of fostering collaboration, the government’s approach left many rural residents feeling like collateral damage in a federal experiment. That legacy still haunts red wolf recovery efforts today.
The wolves are currently classified as a “non‑essential, experimental” population. This status provides the agency some flexibility to work with landowners and, in limited cases, let them defend their property. Environmental activists, including the Center for Biological Diversity, have sued to reclassify the wolves as essential. They argue that because these animals are the only wild red wolves left, their loss would doom the species.
Changing the designation now would do far more than alter a label. Declaring the population essential would trigger new layers of federal regulation, including stricter land‑use restrictions, designations of “critical habitat,” and mandatory, potentially lengthy reviews for even minor land-use projects. The landowners and local communities who already bear the costs of living with red wolves would face even greater risks and fewer reasons to cooperate.
While such a ruling might satisfy activists in the short term, it would only further discourage the sort of cooperation needed to sustain wolves in the long term. More importantly, it would set a damaging precedent that risks undermining trust in future reintroductions of endangered species elsewhere.
The regulatory flexibility that comes with the experimental, non-essential designation is crucial. When the federal government reintroduces such a population of an at-risk species, it often tries to earn local support by relaxing certain protections. In the case of the red wolf, for instance, landowners were allowed to kill an animal if it was actively attacking livestock or pets.
The government’s overall approach clearly didn’t go nearly far enough to engender cooperation with the red wolf. But setting a precedent that signals the feds are willing to rewrite the rulebook decades into a reintroduction would squash future hopes of collaborating with locals far beyond North Carolina.
There is a better path for endangered species policy. Federal wildlife managers and conservationists should focus on building partnerships: offering fair compensation when reintroduced predators take livestock, funding coexistence measures, and rewarding landowners who create and protect habitat. When people see tangible benefits from sharing their land with wildlife rather than suffer punitive costs, they are far more likely to help imperiled species thrive.
Seeing red wolves eventually thrive in the wild would require trust, collaboration, and policies that make landowners part of the solution. Declaring the population essential would be a step in the wrong direction, further risking the wolves’ future while also threatening the much broader cause of finding ways to turn locals into collaborators in endangered species conservation.
Tate Watkins is a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center.
