Feds will hold Asha the wolf for breeding
Originally published on July 26, 2024 at 6:39 am MDT in the Santa Fe Reporter: https://www.sfreporter.com/news/morningword/2024/07/26/feds-award-sfcc-500000-for-enviro-tech-training-program/
The Mexican gray wolf known to the public as Asha, but to US Fish & Wildlife Service staff as F2754, will remain in captivity through next year as as scientists continue to attempt breeding her. An agency spokesmen tells the Associated Press that Asha—who has been held in a facility in Socorro since her 2023 capture in the Jemez Mountains—has shown signs of breeding and bonding with a captive male wolf (Arcadia) though has not yet had pups; both wolves and their pups could be released next year depending on how the next breeding cycle goes, she says. Advocacy organizations decried the decision for Asha, whose prior far-flung travels spotlit the tension between the federal government’s plans for the species’ recovery, and the species’ fundamental nature. “Asha deserves to be free and wild,” WildEarth Guardians Wildlife Program Director Chris Smith says in a statement. “She has done nothing wrong—she has followed her instincts into suitable wolf habitat in Northern New Mexico and is being punished for it. Asha belongs in the wild whether she breeds or not; there are some pretty telling layers to this.” Cyndi Tuell, Western Watersheds Project’s Arizona and New Mexico director, says Asha and “others like her, are showing us where the wolves want to be. The human-created maps, with imaginary lines on the ground where wolves are not allowed, ignore what science tells us—that the southern Rocky Mountains are home to the Mexican gray wolf. Making Asha’s freedom dependent on her ability to breed represents an outdated and unscientific philosophy held by wildlife managers that needs to change.”
