November 28, 2025
by Dr. Fran Santiago-Ávila
WW1 Science and Advocacy Director
A young wolf wakes in Northeast Washington’s Kettle Range, in the pale light, just before dawn. She lifts her head from the warm flank of a sibling as her family begins to stir around her; a low whimper from a pup, a gentle nudge from an uncle, and everyone starts stretching after a long fall night. She yawns, shakes some frost from her coat, and greets her family with their morning ritual: nuzzling, licking muzzles, yipping in recognition. They are alive, well, and loved.
Soon, this young wolf and her family set out across the valley, moving with what seems like intuitive cohesion. They nose through snow for signs of prey, play along a frozen creek, bed down again beneath thick fir branches.
To be a wolf is to live in a world structured by relationships: cooperation, communication, caregiving, and play.
Wolves’ close family ties are the foundation of their well-being, but they are also one of their greatest vulnerabilities. Wolves value not just their own lives but also those of their loved ones. When one of them disappears forever, the remaining family members mourn. When the family is torn apart, the survivors are changed forever.
Washington’s wolf families are under increasing threat.
Each year, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) bows to political pressure to kill wolves and fracture families, to satisfy a twisted desire for revenge against wolf packs who prey upon cattle abandoned to wander unprotected in their habitat. WDFW leadership knows that killing wolves does not reduce future conflicts with cattle, but they do it anyway.
WDFW’s policies signal that Washington does not value its endangered wolves, and that killing them is the ultimate solution to conflicts. This emboldens beef producers to shoot them in so-called “caught in the act” killings, and poachers to illegally shoot and poison them. WDFW enforcement never catches wolf poachers, and even if they did, the consequences are less severe than killing a deer out of season.
Meanwhile, over the past four years, Tribal hunting and trapping killed an average of nearly 9% of the state’s wolves each year.
These pressures are taking their toll, both on wolf families and the population as a whole. Last year, the population dropped for the first time since wolves returned to Washington in 2008, declining by 9% to just 230 wolves, with an alarming 25% drop in breeding pairs.
Our Not My WDFW campaign documents, in detail, how the WDFW wolf management strays from science and ethics, and how these systemic failures lead directly to broken families, unnecessary killing, and preventable conflicts.
When institutions fail our wolves, Washington Wildlife First steps in.
- With your help, we defeated WDFW Director Kelly Susewind’s attempt last year to convince the Fish and Wildlife Commission to downlist wolves on the state endangered species list, which he pushed even though the population has not met standards for downlisting—and WDFW’s own model shows that at current mortality levels, there is only a 1-4% chance it will reach recovery in the next 50 years.
- The push to prematurely remove state wolf protections resurfaced in 2025 in the form of HB 1311, which would have ignored science to downlist wolves by legislative fiat. WDFW and Conservation Northwest supported the bill, and we were told that resisting it was futile. We fought back anyway—and with your help, we stopped HB 1311.
- Last month, we took WDFW to court and got a temporary restraining order that stopped it from destroying the Sherman wolf family until its kill order expired. The Shermans would have been the fourth wolf family WDFW has destroyed for Diamond M Ranch, which allows its cattle to roam unprotected in the Colville National Forest, fails to treat sick and injured cattle, and leaves dead cattle out near its herds to attract predators.
- Earlier this month, we led a successful campaign to prevent WDFW from abducting up to 15 of our wolves to ship them to Colorado. Our coalition letter and public testimony describe our deep ethical and scientific concerns with Colorado’s request: the damage it would do to Washington’s fragile population, and the toll it would take on individual wolves and their families.
WDFW knows we are always watching, ready to protect Washington’s wolf families at the Commission, before the legislature, or in court.
Please join our fight for Washington’s wild families.
Washington’s wild families are more than just “populations” to us, to be relocated or “removed” like pieces in a board game. We fight for Washington’s wild families because they cannot fight for themselves, and because a wolf’s morning with her loved ones should not be shattered by human persecution driven by prejudice, profit, or politics.
If you share our belief that we must co-exist with Washington’s wild families, and treat them with empathy and respect, we invite you to stand with us.