CHEYENNE -- State wildlife officials have canceled plans to reintroduce the black-footed ferret in southern Albany County because of landowner skittishness over a petition by environmental groups to give the animal more protection as an endangered species.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department intended to release about 60 black-footed ferrets, among the rarest animals in North America, during the next two months on private land in southern Albany County, said Bob Oakleaf, nongame species coordinator for the agency.

But the two landowners participating in the reintroduction now don't want the ferrets released on their land, Oakleaf said, because they're worried about a petition filed last month by three environmental groups seeking to have the animals living on public lands receive full federal protection as an endangered species.

The landowners, whom Oakleaf declined to name, fear that petition will eventually result in the ferrets on private land -- their land -- also being listed as an endangered species, causing the government to restrict road building and other activities.

The petition, filed Sept. 8 with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by the groups WildEarth Guardians, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance and Center for Native Ecosystems, says the 500 or so wild ferrets currently living in southeast Wyoming's Shirley Basin are at risk because of widespread shooting and poisoning of prairie dogs, the ferrets' only prey.

Ferrets have been reintroduced to the wild as "nonessential, experimental" populations, giving landowners and wildlife managers more flexibility than if the animals had the full protection of the Endangered Species Act.

Once widespread across the central and southwestern plains of the United States, the black-footed ferret was considered extinct for several years until a Meeteetse ranch dog brought home a dead ferret in 1981. More were found, and following a captive-breeding program, 228 ferrets were reintroduced into the wild in 1991.

Though disease almost wiped out the wild ferrets in the late 1990s, the animal has staged a remarkable comeback. The wild black-footed ferret population grew 35 percent a year from 2003 to 2006. The Shirley Basin is the only place in Wyoming where ferrets have been reintroduced.

Game and Fish had planned to start a new ferret population in southern Albany County, away from the Shirley Basin, to prevent another disease outbreak from wiping out the species in Wyoming, Oakleaf said.

But the petition has scared away the private landowners from participating -- perhaps permanently, Oakleaf said.

"I don't know if it'll ever happen now, to be honest with you," Oakleaf said. "Because the damage has been done. Basically the landowners have been participating in this program with the assurance that this would not be something that happened."

That breach of trust, he said, puts the very survival of the black-footed ferret at stake, as the existing populations remain vulnerable to disease.

"I'm just hoping that it's a big enough population at this point to withstand that threat," Oakleaf said. "... It's almost sacrilegious to those of us that have worked with endangered species for something like this to be going on."

But Duane Short of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance said landowners should have no fears that introducing black-footed ferrets onto their land will lead to government restrictions on the use of their property.

Opponents of the Endangered Species Act, Short said, are trying to exploit people's fears as a way to undermine environmental protection for a threatened species.

"It's sort of a Chicken Little approach to reality," Short said. "I would ask (landowners) to read the Endangered Species Act and to look at the language and find any case that they might want to show that there is a slippery slope. There is no slippery slope."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is evaluating the petition, said Seth Willey, a regional recovery coordinator for the agency. Willey said there's no time frame for issuing a ruling on the petition.

Contact capital bureau Jeremy Pelzer at 307-632-1244 or jeremy.pelzer@trib.com