‘The committee failed’: Wyoming endorses hitting wolves with snowmobiles — so long as they’re killed

As long as predators are killed, legislators say people should be able to hit them with a snowmobile.
By Billy Arnold / Environmental Reporter

Ten Wyoming legislators unanimously backed a bill Monday that would explicitly make it legal for people to hit wolves with snowmobiles and other motorized vehicles — so long as those people make “all reasonable efforts” to kill the animal after injuring or disabling it.

In doing so, the legislative committee formally eschewed requiring people to kill wolves “humanely,” having previously failed to agree on a definition.

The bill was drafted in response to a February incident in which a Daniel man was accused of running a wolf over with a snowmobile and then parading the live animal around a bar before killing it. For his actions, Cody Roberts was not charged with animal cruelty — the Wyoming Game and Fish Department said such charges don’t apply to animals the state considers “predators” — or hitting wildlife with a snowmobile. In Wyoming the practice, known as “wolf whacking,” is legal. Instead, Roberts was cited $250 for possession of live wildlife.

The incident prompted international outrage and calls to overturn Wyoming laws that legalize using snowmobiles and other vehicles to hit wolves and other animals the state considers predators: coyotes, jackrabbits, porcupines, raccoons, red foxes, skunks and stray cats).

Instead, the bill advanced Monday enshrines that right, flying in the face of former Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologists, wildlife advocates and hunters who have called for banning the practice.

For the past four months, Rep. Liz Storer, D-Jackson, has steered the Treatment of Predators Working Group assembled to reevaluate parts of Wyoming’s predator policy after the February incident.

On Monday she suggested that group missed the mark.

“The committee failed to draft a bill that addresses directly the first of the public’s concerns,” Storer said Monday. “In the end, we’re only suggesting that this committee sponsor a bill that would create an additional fine for something that is already illegal.”

Rep. Liz Storer

Rep. Liz Storer, D-Jackson, listens during the Wyoming Legislature’s 2024 session. Storer was picked to lead a subcommittee that will studied. On Monday, she was critical of its progress, but voted for a bill it advanced that would allow people to hit predators with snowmobiles — so long as they’re killed afterwards.

MICHAEL S SMITH
Wolves cannot be hunted in Yellowstone or Grand Teton National Park. But Wyoming considers wolves “trophy game” in areas surrounding the parks, and “predators” in the remaining 85% of the state, a designation that means that people can legally kill an unlimited number of the canines. There are only a few restrictions: People must follow specific trapping regulations and are not allowed to shoot wolves from vehicles, not allowed to use automatic weapons and not allowed to shoot animals while intoxicated. Killing wolves, coyotes and other predators with snowmobiles is currently legal.

In the first few weeks after Roberts’ actions went public, Gov. Mark Gordon assembled a close-knit group of advisors to weigh how the state should respond to the international outrage. In the first legislative meeting about wolf policy after the incident, they presented a tightly coordinated message, urging lawmakers to not act rashly, avoiding changing hunting and predator management statutes when mulling reform. Gordon’s inner circle was appointed to the group Storer chaired and, after the governor urged its members to focus solely on animal cruelty statutes — not banning wildlife whacking, which Gordon previously said was prudent — they did exactly that.

The bill makes it clear that failing to kill an animal after hitting and injuring it with a snowmobile is animal cruelty. It raises the fine for animal cruelty — the “already illegal” act Storer described — from $750 to $1,000. And it gives Game and Fish explicit permission and direction to prosecute anyone who injures or disables a legally defined predator with a snowmobile but doesn’t immediately try to kill it.

Somebody who commits a second offense within five years could be fined up to $5,000. The maximum prison sentence is six months.

Though Storer was critical of the final bill, she voted with the rest of the Travel, Recreation, Wildlife & Cultural Resources Committee to advance the bill. So did Rep. Andrew Byron, R-Hoback, and Sen. Mike Gierau, D-Jackson. None of the three legislators explained their votes during the Monday meeting. The committee will now sponsor the measure in the upcoming 2025 legislative session, which starts in January.

Storer did, however, spend most of her opening remarks explaining what the predator group did not do. That included failing to consider other, nonlethal means of predator control, defining the word humane so they could apply it to treatment of predatory animals and failing to ban “wolf whacking” for sport while carving out an exemption for agriculture. During the predator group’s meetings, ranchers said they used snowmobiles to kill predators and protect young livestock.

Legislators considered an amendment that would have made it illegal for anyone to injure or disable a predator by any means without immediately killing it. But the state livestock lobby opposed the amendment, worrying about other forms of predator control — like shooting them from aircraft, trapping or using toxic chemicals.

Wolf meeting

This image is from a video provided by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in connection to the investigation of Cody Roberts’ treatment of a wolf on Feb. 29. Roberts allegedly hit the animal with a snowmobile before bringing it into a bar and killing it out back. An investigation is underway.

WYOMING GAME AND FISH DEPARTMENT
thumbnail_Cody Roberts Mugging for the wolf he crippled with his snowmobile..jpg

Cody Roberts mugs for patrons of the Green River Bar in Daniel, Wyoming, with the wolf he legally crippled with his snowmobile in February and later killed.

PHOTO Courtesy of Cowboy State Daily
“It would be a real mistake to try and broaden this to cover all of those different types of tools,” said Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association. “We’re seeing attacks on the tools that we’ve used. We’ve lost several of those as a result of federal actions, and we simply cannot afford, as an industry, to lose more.”

The chair of the Travel Committee later killed the amendment.

“I think we’ll set that aside because we don’t have time to do that properly,” Rep. Sandy Newsome, R-Cody, said shortly before the vote.

Gierau did, however, convince the committee to amend the draft bill, giving judges ability to strip up to three years of hunting and fishing privileges from anyone who breaks the proposed law.

Judges already have the ability to revoke privileges when wildlife-related crimes are committed, Gierau said. But he wanted to explicitly apply that judicial discretion to the matter at hand.

Even that measure was controversial.

“That’s a pretty hard whack of the ruler, so to speak,” said Rep. Cyrus Western, R-Big Horn. “I don’t know if it quite makes me comfortable for a first offense, coming down that hard.”

But Gierau pushed back.

“This gives a judge discretion to say anywhere from zero to three years,” he said. “It’s not formatted to say automatically three years.”

Another conservative lawmaker and rancher backed Gierau’s proposal.

“We’re not here to put people in jail unnecessarily,” said Rep. John Winters, R-Thermopolis. “Residents of Wyoming value their hunting privileges so very much, and I think this may be a real deterrent.”

Wyoming’s livestock and farm lobbies were the only two groups to speak in favor of the measure Monday, echoing past support.

Each of the other 10 speakers who addressed the committee opposed the bill. That included Paul Ulrich, a Sublette County resident and oil and gas executive, who addressed the committee as an individual.

Ulrich said he had a hard time squaring the measure with the “public trust doctrine,” the idea that the state is not an owner, but a trustee, of its wildlife. He said Wyoming’s laws allowing predators to be killed “in any manner” doesn’t square with that philosophy.

He urged the committee to require people to kill predators “in an expeditious and humane manner,” which he said would better reflect “the values of my great state and your great state of Wyoming.”

“Go back to the values we actually love,” he said.

The committee did not discuss his request.