Petition: Father and Son Mexican Wolves Were Among the Last of Their Kind. Both Died in Traps.

They belonged to the Sawtooth Pack in the forests of western New Mexico: a five-year-old father and his yearling son, both Mexican gray wolves, one of the most endangered mammals in North America. Both are dead. Each was caught in a privately set trap on private land near Datil, in two separate incidents, and their deaths are now the subject of a federal investigation serious enough that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service served a search warrant on nearby properties. Rewards totaling more than $100,000 have been offered for information leading to a conviction. The Mexican gray wolf was hunted to near-extinction and brought back only through decades of captive breeding and reintroduction, and the population remains small enough that every single animal counts toward whether the species survives at all. Losing a breeding male and his son is not a statistic; it is a measurable setback to a recovery that people have spent a lifetime building. Please sign the petition urging federal authorities to pursue this case fully and to keep these wolves protected.

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There is a policy gap underneath this case worth understanding. New Mexico prohibits trapping on public lands, but livestock producers may still use leg-hold traps on private property, typically set for coyotes. A trap cannot tell the difference between a coyote and one of the last few hundred Mexican gray wolves on Earth, which means legally placed devices keep killing a federally protected species by accident — and make deliberate killings far harder to distinguish from accidental ones. That is why this petition asks for two things at once: a fully resourced investigation and prosecution in this case, and stronger protections for gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act so the next wolf does not die the same way. One Green Planet has covered the repeated threats to this species in Tell the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to Stop Killing Endangered Wolves, and the Wolf Conservation Center’s account of the federal investigation is available here.

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