As you may have heard, the states of Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin are going to remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species List because protecting them has caused them to thrive. Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are shortly to follow suit. The predictable result, of course, is that hunters are now lining up to shoot them, and thus propel them to where they were at the beginning of the last century: the verge of extinction.

Even though conserving the wolf is not only an economic boon and wolves have been shown to be a keystone species for ecosystems, people still want to kill them. Just one more piece of depressing evidence that the much hoped for moral evolution of the human species still has a ways to go with some of our proud members.