Environmentalists’ efforts to rid Utah’s La Sal Mountains of nonnative mountain goats derailed this week after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the U.S. Forest Service’s decision to allow the state’s controversial translocation program putting goats into fragile alpine areas.
In a decision handed down Tuesday, appellate judges ruled that the Forest Service has no legal authority to prohibit Utah wildlife officials from releasing goats onto state land adjacent to federal land, even if the point of the release was to establish a goat herd in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. The ruling struck a blow for states’ prerogative to manage wildlife on federal lands.
“Federal ownership of lands within a State does not in itself withdraw those lands from the jurisdiction of the State,” senior Judge Bobby Ray Baldock, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the 10th Circuit, wrote for the three-judge panel hearing the case. “Utah, not as a private property owner but in its sovereign capacity, has historically possessed broad trustee and police powers over wildlife within its borders.”
The La Sal goat program isn’t out of the woods because the ruling affirmed the Forest Service’s right to remove goats if it decides that step is necessary to protect the the 2,380-acre La Sals’ Mount Peale Research Natural Area...