Moscow Republican Sen. Gary Schroeder has been getting a lot of heat for his bill that would authorize that would authorize Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game Department to offer the state’s surplus wolves to ant state that will take them.

Schroeder, a fur trader, hung a wolf pelt up on the wall of the Senate Environment and Resources Committee hearing room Monday when he introduced the bill just to show he meant business. Under his bill Fish and Game will send letters to other states asking them if they wanted any wolves.

“If another state wants wolves I think we gain,” Schroeder said. “If they don’t want them, fine.”

“It’s a strategy bill,” he said.

The strategy he espoused is that if other states won’t take our extra wolves we will have no choice but to open a hunting season or if necessary, to allow federal agents to kill them. But the white-haired fox really has another strategy and it’s aimed and the anti-wolf leaders in the state who want to pick a fight with the federal government we cannot win .

When a federal judge reversed the Bush Administration’s delisting of wolves in the Northern Rockies, anti-wolf forces across the West sought a response that would put the pro-wolf forces, the states and the federal government on the defensive. The Montana Shooting Sports Association drafted a bill that challenges federal authority to force wolves on the state.

The Montana bill, which has since been introduced in the Legislature, would void the state's cooperative management agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and void its wolf management plan.

It also would declare that the wolves now in the state were out of compliance with state wolf policy and any efforts to arrest people for killing wolves in the state would be a crime with a jail sentence. A similar bill may come in Idaho this year.

Attorneys for Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden told Schroeder and others the bill would not survive a court challenge and would cost the state millions of dollars at a time when the state budget is already hurting. Wasden and Gov, Butch Otter are urging lawmakers be patient and see how the Obama Administration plans to handle the issue, headed at Interior by rancher Ken Salazar from Colorado.

Schroeder’s bill allows the Legislature to help make its case in the court of public opinion that it needs to be able to control the 800 to 1,100 wolves in at least 88 packs in the state. But it keeps Idaho from going on a fruitless legal campaign that will only undercut the state’s arguments that it can responsibly manage wolves without the federal government looking over its shoulder.