Howling For Wolves is pausing activities

Dear Wolf Advocates,

It has been a great honor for Howling For Wolves to serve, fight and advocate for wild wolves living in Minnesota. Howling For Wolves launched our wolf protection action in February 2012, when the MN Department of Natural Resources (DNR) proposed and the Minnesota State Legislature passed expedited emergency rule-making to have wolf hunting seasons. With your support and active involvement following a federal court decision in 2014, we stopped wolf hunting in Minnesota. We worked to influence the Minnesota state governance and state legislature and even the U.S. Congress to keep wolves protected. There has been no wolf hunt in Minnesota since 2014. We helped secure funding for nonlethal preventive methods for livestock producers which is ongoing. And in 2023, our board member’s research was published in Nature’s Communications Biology showing that wolf hunts ignite illegal wolf killing that lasts for years after the hunts end.

Howling For Wolves is now pausing our activities. We have worked tirelessly and with no compensation for our board of directors so that we could be maximally effective. We now need to pause and refresh and consider our next steps. While the current political situation is daunting, and this has the appearance of influencing our decision to stop, we are stopping for personal and professional reasons.

As wolf advocates, we strongly encourage you to continue to communicate with your state and federal legislators. You can tell them you want more funding for nonlethal wolf conflict prevention methods and that wolf hunts work against these methods. Wolf hunts serve no purpose, but are cruel torture with baiting and snaring that provides indecent thrills for wolf killers. You can track the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ activities. The MN DNR are the arbiters of whether the wolf is truly protected. The MN DNR enforces illegal wolf killing and they have the authority to have wolf hunts.

Our website will remain available to provide information, but it will not be updated.

It has been an honor to have you by our side as we fought for the wolf. Please continue the fight.

Sincerely and with much gratitude.
   Dr. Maureen Hackett
   President and Founder
   Howling For Wolves