The state Department of Natural Resources told the Chippewa Indian tribe they can have 85 of the 201 wolf hunting permits the state plans to issue as part of a wolf hunt scheduled for this fall.
But the wolf hunt will proceed as planned despite the tribe’s request that it be halted in tribal territories in northern Wisconsin, DNR officials announced Thursday.
The wolf hunt, approved in March by the state Legislature, is set to begin Oct. 15 and extend through February.
The Voigt Intertribal Task Force, consisting of Chippewa tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, had asked the DNR to halt the wolf hunt in territories ceded to the Chippewa in the mid-1800s.
In a letter to DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp, dated Aug. 2, Jim Zorn, executive administrator of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, wrote that the DNR goal of reducing the state’s wolf population from 850 to 350 would “reduce the population to a level the tribes consider ecologically unsound, culturally inappropriate, violative of their rights and potentially unsustainable.” Read more…