By MEAD GRUVER
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A Wyoming man who allegedly hit a wolf with a snowmobile, taped the wounded animal’s mouth shut and showed it off in a rural bar before killing it has been indicted on an animal cruelty charge by a grand jury nearly a year and a half after the incident.
Cody Roberts last year paid a $250 fine for illegal possession of wildlife but avoided more serious charges as investigators struggled to find cooperative witnesses. Wyoming law gives wide leeway for people to kill wolves and other predators by a variety of means in the vast majority of the state.
Even so, the 12-person grand jury found enough evidence over the past two weeks to support the charge of felony animal cruelty, Sublette County Attorney Clayton Melinkovich said in a statement Wednesday.
Melinkovich had no further comment on the case. Roberts has not commented on the case and did not have a listed working number, nor an attorney on file in state District Court who might comment on his behalf.
If convicted, Roberts faces up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Widely circulated photos showed a man identified as Roberts posing with the wolf, its mouth bound with tape, on Feb. 29, 2024, in a bar near Daniel, a town of about 150 people about 50 miles south of Jackson.
Video clips showed the same animal lying on a floor, alive but barely moving.
The light punishment against Roberts led to calls for a Wyoming tourism boycott, to little apparent effect. Yellowstone National Park had its second-busiest year on record in 2024, up more than 5% from 2023.
Grand juries in Wyoming are rare. The last one to get significant attention, in 2019, found that a sheriff’s deputy did not commit involuntary manslaughter by killing an unarmed man after a traffic stop.
Government-sponsored poisoning, trapping and bounty hunting all but wiped out wolves in the lower 48 states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Starting in the 1990s, a reintroduction program brought them back to Yellowstone and central Idaho, and their numbers have rebounded.
Though wolves remain listed as a federally endangered or threatened species in most of the country, they have no such protection in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, where they can be hunted and trapped.
Exceptions include Yellowstone and neighboring Grand Teton National Park, where hunting is prohibited and the wild canines are a major attraction for millions of tourists. In 85% percent of Wyoming, wolves are classified as predators and can be freely killed by virtually any means.
The so-called predator zone includes Sublette County, where the wolf was killed. Groups including the Humane Society argued that Wyoming’s animal cruelty law could nonetheless apply there.