In the Oval Office, ranchers in cowboy hats, suit jackets and jeans stood behind President Donald Trump as he signed an executive order directing the federal government to review whether Mexican wolves should be demoted under the Endangered Species Act.
“Anybody here have a problem with the Mexican gray wolf?” the president asked, turning to face the ranchers behind him.
“They will kill your livestock, they will kill your dogs, your horses,” said one man from Arizona.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, also in the room, spoke up. “The problem is, because they’re on the endangered species list, they can’t shoot them,” she said, gesturing toward the cattlemen.
But gray wolves and Mexican wolves may not be federally protected for long.
“You can
shoot them as of today?” Trump asked from behind the Resolute Desk. The room broke out in hesitant laughter.
“Well,” Rollins said, “Secretary Burgum has to do a little magic but yes.”
Trump’s order, signed on Sept. 4, does not immediately change the species’ protected status. It gives the Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum 90 days to decide if gray wolves and Mexican wolves have recovered enough to be downlisted or delisted entirely.
Under the existing ESA standards, Mexican wolves do not yet qualify for downlisting. Many ranchers in the Southwest say the wolves are jeopardizing their livelihoods by killing their cattle. Downlisting or delisting would allow for more opportunities to lethally remove the wolves. In the case that the species is downlisted, the executive order would also encourage states to remove any existing state-specific protections.
But environmental law experts and conservationists claim that the president is stoking an age-old culture war to pacify the American ranchers he’s angered with other recent policy decisions. That peace offering, they say, could come at a steep price for the future of Mexican wolves in the United States.
How are ranchers compensated if a wolf kills a cow?
In 1976, Mexican wolves were added to the newly established endangered species list. Hunting and development had brought them to the brink of extinction. At the time, there were no known Mexican wolves in the United States and their numbers in Mexico were dwindling. Now there are 319, as of this past year, marking a decade of steady recovery.
As wolf populations have grown, so has the backlash from ranchers living in their proximity.
In 2025, a fifth-generation Apache County rancher testified to Congress about his experience with wolves. Dalton Dobson told the House Committee on Natural Resources about finding a calf nearly dead from an encounter with a wolf in his field. Dobson, who was 7 years old when Mexican wolves were reintroduced, said he’s been dealing with this issue his whole life.
Ranchers are typically compensated for cows killed by wolves in Arizona and New Mexico, though the death is first investigated by a federal agency. The USDA’s Livestock Indemnity Program now pays full market value for livestock killed by Mexican wolves; before Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it only paid 75% of that value.
But under the USDA program, ranchers are usually only compensated for confirmed wolf kills, not probable wolf kills. And that compensation also doesn’t account for indirect damage from wolves like increased management costs or lower conception rates among cattle. Many say the program doesn’t do enough — some deaths can’t be confirmed because the animals’ bodies are found after they’ve begun decomposing or the cow disappears completely.
In New Mexico, there is some state funding available for indirect damage.
" This is not an economic boost in any meaningful way for ranching community," said Justin Pidot, a law professor at the University of Arizona who served as general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Biden administration. "Even if the wolves are entirely delisted."
A 2025 University of Arizona study found that, generally, at a state or county level, the impacts of wolves aren’t detectable. But it did find that a small number of individual ranches are heavily impacted by wolf depredation on a repeated basis. The study involved 24 survey respondents in Arizona.
“There are lots of challenges, political and cultural, around wolves,” Pidot said. But he thinks Trump’s executive order has little to do with addressing the problems the president is creating for ranchers in other ways.
“It’s red meat for the ranching community,” he said. “It’s engaging in a culture war that's been going on for a long time.”
In August, the president waived higher tariffs on ground beef imports from outside the country to lower prices for consumers, who say that it’s gotten too expensive. The cost of beef has reached record highs in the last few months. But Trump’s solution, to import 300,000 metric tons of beef and sell it at a reduced cost, angered American ranchers.
The Sept. 4 executive order isn’t just about wolves. It also directs the USDA to reevaluate regulations that make it harder for ranchers to sell their beef directly to consumers.
'This isn't about being anti-wolf'
Catron County in New Mexico and Apache County in Arizona have had the most deprivation events since wolves were reintroduced to the states in 1998, according to an investigation earlier this summer by public radio station KUNM. Both counties sit within the Mexican Wolf Experimental Population Area, which was established to help reintroduce wolves into the wild.
Nelson Shirley’s cattle ranches, in western New Mexico and eastern Arizona, overlap with that experimental area. Twenty years ago, he remembers, there were a lot fewer wolves around.
Since reintroducing Mexican wolves in 1998, the Fish and Wildlife Service has employed some programs to help manage livestock-wolf conflict, like using range-riders to monitor and deter wolves and scaring them off using non-lethal methods.
The agency rarely gets involved to lethally remove a wolf who has been involved in depredation events, though this year the agency has intervened a few times. In February, it granted two ranchers permission to shoot and kill any Mexican gray wolf who wandered onto private land on two grazing allotments near the Gila National Forest in Catron County, as well as on federal land within the allotments, if the wolf is actively hurting livestock.
“This isn't about being anti-wolf,” Audrey McQueen, one of the ranchers granted the permit and also a Catron County commissioner, told The Arizona Republic in February. “This is about repeated livestock depredation in a federal management system that is not working for rural New Mexico families.”
The number of depredations in Catron County is declining, even though wolf populations are growing, KUNM found. Depredation events peaked around 2019; since then they've been falling.
This August, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued orders for the removal of two more Mexican wolves from grazing allotments with repeated wolf-livestock conflicts, a move that conservationists say is not a real solution.
“When you see allotments with chronic wolf and livestock conflict, it is time to ask whether there is something different the livestock operator could be doing to minimize the conflict,” said Greta Anderson, deputy director of Western Watersheds Project in a press release in August.
Shirley thinks that coexistence with wolves is possible in the same way that wolves coexist with elk. Hunting is part of that balance. Wolves don’t kill elk out of cruelty but out of necessity.
“If people are just another animal," he said, "why can’t we coexist in a similar way?”
Wolf numbers, wolf genetics play into decision
The executive order hasn’t come out of nowhere. In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Three years later, the agency reinstated those protections after a court ordered them to do so.
In the northern Rocky Mountain states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, gray wolves have been delisted since 2011, resulting in new opportunities for hunting and trapping. This summer, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials proposed new limits on the hunting quota after an agency study showed wolf populations in the state were declining. Populations haven't declined to the point that the wolves have been relisted.
So far, state and federal agencies have not attempted to delist the Mexican wolf, a genetically distinct sub-species of gray wolf. But this July, the Arizona Game and Fish Department, New Mexico Department of Wildlife and U.S. FWS announced they were preparing a petition to downlist the species.
Trump's executive order can’t override a federal statute, Pidot said. “ The statutes Congress passes are the law of the land, and executive orders are directions to agencies about how they're supposed to implement the law.”
Under the Fish and Wildlife Service's most recent Mexican wolf recovery plan, there are two possible downlisting scenarios.
The first says that U.S. Mexican wolf populations must average at least 320 wolves over a four-year period and that genetic diversity from captive wolves is incorporated into the U.S. population. The second scenario requires each population in the United States and Mexico to maintain an average of 150 wolves over four years and that genetic diversity from captive wolves has been introduced into both populations.
While Mexican wolf populations have buoyed to 319 in the U.S. just this past year, they haven’t held that quota for the required period of time.
“The numbers are not the issue now,” Jim deVos, the Mexican wolf coordinator at the Arizona Game and Fish Department, told The Republic earlier this year. “It’s the genetics.”
Most conservationists and wildlife biologists now agree that the biggest hurdle for the wolves is genetic diversity. In 1970, when the wolves went nearly extinct in the wild, researchers captured five animals to establish a captive breeding program and bring them back from the brink. That means that the majority of genetic material available for Mexican wolves comes from just five of their ancestors. In Arizona and New Mexico, wolf reintroduction to increase genetic diversity has focused on cross-fostering by placing captive-born pups in wolf dens to be raised by wild mothers.
As of yet, neither of the two recovery scenarios have been met. Arizona does not have state level protections for Mexican wolves. The state relies on funding from the ESA for its wolf recovery operations.
“What remains to be seen is what happens next,” Pidot said. “ I think there will be fair questions asked about whether there's a lot of integrity to that scientific conclusion. That is going to be tested in court for sure.”
Sarah Henry covers environmental issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to sarah.henry@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Trump vows to delist Mexican gray wolf. Experts say, 'Not so fast'
