New Act Immediately Strips Federal Protection from Mexican Wolf, Voids Existing Wildlife Rules

The newly proposed Enhancing Safety for Animals Act of 2025 is short, but its impact is massive. It immediately and completely removes the Mexican wolf (or lobo) from the lists of threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This isn’t a gradual process; the bill states that, notwithstanding any other law, the wolf is delisted. Furthermore, it completely voids specific existing federal rules that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had previously established concerning the wolf’s status and its nonessential experimental population.

The Delisting Hammer: What Changes Now

Removing the Mexican wolf from the ESA list means it loses all federal protections. If this bill passes, the wolf population becomes subject to state and tribal management plans, which often allow for more aggressive control measures, including lethal removal, in response to livestock conflicts. This is a huge shift in policy, moving the species from federal oversight—which prioritizes recovery—to a patchwork of local rules. The bill’s findings claim this is justified because the population has shown nine straight years of growth, reaching at least 286 wild wolves by the end of 2024, suggesting recovery goals are being met.

Ranchers and the Compensation Catch-22

One section of the bill focuses on a very real, very frustrating problem for ranchers: getting compensated for livestock killed by wolves. The bill’s findings specifically call out the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) for imposing a standard that requires proof of subcutaneous hemorrhaging on a carcass to confirm a wolf kill. As the bill points out, this is often an impossible standard to meet—grazing areas are huge, kills are found days later, and scavengers quickly destroy evidence. For a rancher, this means they often bear the financial loss of a confirmed wolf kill because the specific, hyper-technical evidence required by the government is gone. While the bill doesn't set a new compensation standard, highlighting this issue puts pressure on APHIS to fix a broken system that has been unfair to those losing valuable livestock.

Drawing a Line in the Sand: U.S. vs. Mexico Wolves

Perhaps the most forward-looking provision deals with how the government manages the wolf if it ever needs to be listed again. The bill mandates that future U.S. recovery plans must completely ignore the status of the Mexican wolf population in Mexico. This means that U.S. conservation efforts would be judged solely on domestic numbers, even if the overall North American population remains fragile due to issues south of the border. Conservationists often view the wolf population as a single, connected unit, but this bill forces the U.S. government to treat its recovery efforts as purely domestic, potentially weakening the long-term genetic health and viability of the species by separating the recovery goals.