Restoring wildlife in southwest Montana.
The Lawsuit
The Gravelly Mountains in southwest Montana are an important part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Grizzly bears use the area and are protected as a threatened species because their populations are isolated. The Gravelly Range could connect the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide populations of grizzly bears, but the U.S. Forest Service permits a few private individuals to graze over 15,000 domestic sheep in the heart of this crucial grizzly corridor. Grizzly bears are killed for eating the sheep. Domestic sheep easily transmit fatal pneumonia to their gregarious cousins when the two species come in contact. Bighorn sheep are not allowed on Bighorn Mountain in the Gravelly Range because of domestic sheep. A BLM employee found a dead bighorn sheep on one of the sheep grazing allotments.
The U.S. Forest Service has been saying it would prepare new environmental analysis on the impacts of sheep grazing since 2005. In 2016, Cottonwood won a lawsuit on behalf of Gallatin Wildlife Association that required the Forest Service to determine whether it needed to prepare supplemental environmental analysis for the grazing. The Forest Service decided that it did not need to complete supplemental analysis by claiming there had been no recent grizzly bear/sheep conflicts. Cottonwood secured documents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via a Freedom of Information Act request that say five grizzly bears have been killed because of the sheep grazing.
This lawsuit seeks to allow grizzly bears and bighorn sheep like these to repopulate the Gravelly Mountains.
The Remedy
Cottonwood is asking the federal court to require a completion schedule for the decades over-due analysis and to stop domestic sheep grazing until the analysis is completed.
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