Oppose Proposed Hunting Expansion in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness

Our National Wildlife Refuge system was created specifically to conserve and protect wildlife across the country in habitats as varied as the mountains of the Rockies, the hardwood forests and coastal beaches of the east, the prairies of the Midwest, the deserts of the southwest, and the great wild expanses of Alaska. Yet without any meaningful environmental analysis of the impacts to native biodiversity or—in many cases—Wilderness, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is proposing to expand hunting in numerous refuges across the country, including the Cabeza Prieta and others with Wilderness.

Please take action before June 8 and urge the FWS to drop its ill-conceived plan to expand hunting in Cabeza Prieta.

Wilderness Watch is especially alarmed by FWS’s proposed changes for the 860,000-acre Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in southern Arizona. The refuge includes the 803,000-acre Cabeza Prieta Wilderness, the largest national wildlife Wilderness outside Alaska. Here are some of the proposed changes in hunting policy that could significantly affect Cabeza:

• Allowing previously prohibited predator hunting. This includes mountain lions, badgers, coyotes, bobcats, gray foxes, kit foxes, ringtails, and spotted skunks. The agency admits, “Because none of these species is formally surveyed on the refuge, exact population estimates do not exist and demographic trends are unknown.”
• Year-round hunting for certain species, such as cottontail rabbits, two species of jackrabbits, and Eurasian collared doves. Expanded hunting season (241 days) for bobcats, ringtails, badgers, and kit and gray foxes.
• A near doubling in visitor use and corresponding impacts to wildlife, solitude, and the desert’s fragile plants and soil.
• While the Fish and Wildlife Service documents are not explicitly clear, they lead one to believe the Service would allow motorized or mechanized access into Wilderness for bighorn sheep hunters, despite the Wilderness Act’s prohibition on such use.

Wildlife in the Cabeza NWR is already stressed by a myriad of problems such as ongoing drought in the southwest, long-term climate change, and President Trump’s border wall construction that is ripping apart the refuge’s southern border with Mexico and blocking critical wildlife migration routes.

Cabeza has an amazing diversity of wildlife, but the number of animals is limited by the spare environment. Having essentially an open season on hunting these species not only threatens their existence, it sends the wrong message that these animals aren’t valuable members of Cabeza’s community of life.

Now is not the time to further stress wildlife by increasing visitor use and opening the Cabeza NWR to more hunting.

Please take action and tell the Fish and Wildlife Service to fulfill its responsibility to protect wildlife rather than blindly expanding hunting and fishing in Cabeza Prieta and other refuges.