Why wolves? An analysis of private organization decision making in filing citizen suits\ud under the Endangered Species Act

Graduation date: 2017The Endangered Species Act is hailed as the “gold standard” of species conservation legislation\ud both in the U.S. and globally. There are scarce conservation funds that we as a society can spend\ud on the recovery of endangered species, so it is important to understand how the parties involved\ud with this legislation choose which species to prioritize. There is literature that shows the\ud government allocates funds to individual species mainly based on visceral characteristics such as\ud body length, and allocates funds in response to short term political pressure. However, there is\ud little literature on the motivations behind why private organizations target specific species in\ud lawsuits against the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). In this paper, I conducted an empirical\ud study to find evidence for these motivations. I find that body length and the taxonomic\ud classification of the species (mammal, fish, etc.) is significant to how environmental non-profits\ud make these decisions, and economic conflict is significant to how corporate groups decide which\ud species to target