Outrage over how a man struck a wolf with a snowmobile, taped the injured animal’s mouth shut and brought it into a bar has resulted in a proposal to tweak Wyoming’s animal cruelty law to apply to people who legally kill wolves by intentionally running them over.
Under draft legislation headed to a legislative committee Monday, people could still intentionally run over wolves but only if the animal is killed quickly, either upon impact or soon after.
Wyoming’s animal cruelty law is currently written to not apply at all to predators such as wolves. The proposed change would require a person who hits a wolf that survives to immediately use “all reasonable efforts” to kill it.
The bill doesn’t specify how a surviving wolf is to be killed after it is intentionally struck.
That sounds unreasonable if it’s unqualified.
There are legitimate, if fringe, reasons that you might want to hit a wolf but not kill it. Say the thing is chasing down someone and you hit it with a snowmobile. But in this hypothetical case, unlike the situation above, it’s not seriously injured and heads off in another direction. Imposing a legal obligation to make every effort to personally kill the thing at that point seems unreasonable.
At the least, I’d think that this should only apply to predators that are obviously seriously injured.