One of New Mexico seven state game commissioners has been removed from her post due to her involvement in a marketing campaign pushing for looser protections for the Mexican gray wolf.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham removed Sabrina Pack of Silver City from the commission that sets hunting and fishing regulations on Wednesday after the Western Watersheds Project obtained public records regarding the apparent conflict of interest.
Those records revealed the company Pack works for, SkyWest Media, produced a marketing strategy advocating for changes to the management of the wolf, whose federally protected status has often been cause for ire in the rural southwestern New Mexico communities Pack represented on the commission.
Lujan Grisham appointed Pack to the commission in 2024.
A spokesman for the governor Jodi McGinnis Porter, wrote Pack had failed to disclose a conflict of interest and didn’t recuse herself from “pertinent votes.” McGinnis Porter did not specify exactly what the conflict of interest was or what votes Pack should have recused herself from, but shed added game commissioners are subject to the Governmental Conduct Act.
“She will be replaced when a suitable candidate is located,” McGinnis Porter wrote.
In an email to The New Mexican, Pack wrote she did not take any votes related to Mexican wolf management and would have recused herself from future votes.
Her employment at SkyWest Media was no surprise to the Governor’s Office, Pack wrote, stressing she is not an owner of the Arizona and New Mexico-based company but its chief operations officer.
“My employment at a marketing/broadcast company was thoroughly discussed with the governor’s office prior to appointment,” Pack wrote. “My professional work is entirely separate from my service as a commissioner. I did not view my professional role as a conflict of interest.”
Sabrina Pack
Courtesy photo – New Mexico Department of Game and Fish
Pack wrote she was “saddened” by the decision to remove her. She felt progress was being made on reaching consensus on a wolf management plan that would ensure species success while reducing impacts on people living in the animals’ range.
“This is a volunteer position,” Pack said in an interview. “I’ve worked really hard to listen to all sides, no matter what the sides are of the issue, and really try to bring people together who are from opposing sides.”
A pitch document prepared by SkyWest Media and provided to The New Mexican presents a weekslong marketing plan to increase “empathy and credibility” for rural residents affected by the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf through social media and video storytelling.
“ ‘Wolves among us’ is more than a media project — it’s a movement to restore balance to a complex conversation, led by those who’ve lived it,” the document stated. It estimated a project budget of between $50,000 and $100,000 based on campaign success.
Other emails provided to The New Mexican show Pack communicating about flyers and a radio spot with Audrey McQueen, a Catron County commissioner and member of the County Livestock Loss Authority, and Tom Paterson, president-elect of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association.
Catron County commissioners declared a state of emergency in April due to wolf depredations in the county and are scheduled to discuss the issue at the Game Commission’s meeting Friday.
In one email thread, the three discuss the script for an on-air “public safety message” about increasing incidents of people encountering Mexican gray wolves, as well as a plug for the website WolvesAmongUs.org.
The script draft advises people that they are allowed to harass, injure or kill a wolf threatening a person, and livestock owners are allowed to shoot wolves caught red-handed biting livestock on nonfederal lands south of Interstate 40.
In a May email to Paterson and McQueen, Pack wrote the script was pulled largely from guidance language from federal agencies.
“Just a comment, the language I pulled was specifically from their literature. I didn’t want to go too far into details,” Pack wrote, then quoted the official text. “The phone number is what the Feds say you are required to call if you harass, injure or kill a wolf. The phone number would not be easily remembered in a radio ad unless said three times. This is just an inclusion to cover possible legalities.”
WolvesAmongUs.org says the wolf reintroduction program has grown beyond its scope and includes several videos of people telling stories about their interactions with wolves.
It urges people to contact their governor and legislators to urge several actions, including asking federal officials to give ranchers permits to euthanize wolves or wolf packs that kill four animals in a flock in a two-month period, provide ranchers with GPS collar data and collar all wolves on the landscape, and compensate ranchers for indirect damages from wolves.
Paterson told The New Mexican the project was not funded by the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association. He said he was disappointed by the governor’s decision to remove Pack and did not believe she had a conflict of interest.
“There has never been a Game Commission vote on wolves,” Paterson said. “There has, however, been an outstanding advocate to represent the voices of rural New Mexico on the Game Commission.”
He added,”It’s clear from what happened the wolf advocates don’t want the public to know what it’s like to actually live among wolves.”
Reform bill
Chris Smith, wildlife program director for WildEarth Guardians, said he was “shocked … dismayed and disappointed,” when he read through the records.
“She strikes me as sincere and smart and caring about the issue,” Smith said. “But then to read that she is potentially in a business relationship with people I see as being opponents to wolves, whether or not that relationship was fulfilled or not, that raises a real red flag for me.”
Smith the lack of disclosure about her role in the campaign raises questions of outside influence on the commission.
“There have been, and there will be, people who oppose wolf recovery on the Game Commission moving forward,” Smith said. “But any kind of fiscal investment in those stances needs to be made public — and frankly, people need to make even non-fiscal investments in those issues public.”
Earlier this year, the state Legislature passed a bill including several changes to the state Game Commission and the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. But a key provision to change the commissioner removal process was line-item vetoed by the governor.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham at the Roundhouse in late February. During the 2025 legislative session she signed a measure to overhaul the Game Commission but line-item vetoed a section limiting the governor’s power to remove board members.
Michael G. Seamans/New Mexican file photo
The bill, as passed by legislators, would have allowed commissioners to be removed only for incompetence, neglect of duty or malfeasance, rather than serving at the pleasure of the governor.
But Lujan Grisham wrote in her line-item veto such a provision could drag out the removal process and “paralyze” commission operations. The governor threatened to veto the entire bill if her line-item veto was challenged.
Roberta Salazar-Henry, a former game commissioner who sits on the board of directors of the Doña Ana County Associated Sportsmen, said she doesn’t believe Pack had a conflict of interest and wished there was an opportunity for an independent review.
Neither the state game department nor the Game Commission controls the wolf reintroduction program, Salazar-Henry said, which is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, although the state agency acts in an advisory role.
Salazar-Henry, who spent 25 years working for the Department of Game and Fish and held Pack’s seat from 2019 to 2022, called the ousted commissioner “diplomatic.” Pack was always willing to pick up the phone, regardless of who was calling, she said.
Salazar-Henry resigned from the commission in 2022 out of “sheer frustration.” The longtime department administrator said commissioners struggled to act independently and often feared removal.
“We didn’t know when we were crossing the line,” Salazar-Henry said. “Because we didn’t know the line was there until after you cross it, and then you find out.”
She’s skeptical about the reasons Pack was removed.
“I have a hard time believing that was so egregious to remove her,” Salazar-Henry said. “And I wish they wouldn’t have because she’s a good commissioner. We liked her down here.”
Smith of WildEarth Guardians said the removal process for commissioners in Senate Bill 5 was a “very important” piece of the bill. But although he said he believes commissioners have been dismissed without cause, he thinks Pack’s removal was justified.
“This isn’t a good look, and this is a body that has been in the news for a lot of the wrong reasons for years,” Smith said.
The program
The Mexican gray wolf was declared endangered in the 1970s and reintroduced to eastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico in 1998.
The program has faced an uphill battle. Advocates have expressed concerns about a lack of genetic diversity in the population — captive-raised wolves are now considered more genetically diverse than their counterparts in the wild. They also challenged limitations like the I-40 barrier of the Mexican gray wolf experimental zone and pushed for more bonded family units to be released.
Some livestock owners, on the other hand, have lamented shortfalls in compensation and wolf-deterring programs and pushed for additional information about wolf whereabouts and more lethal removals to protect their livestock from the predator.
A female Mexican gray wolf paces her pen at the Sevilleta Mexican Wolf Management Facility outside Socorro in September 2024.
Gabriela Campos/New Mexican file photo
The population has been growing slowly but steadily. The most recent population count found a minimum of 286 wolves across New Mexico and Arizona, the ninth year in a row the number of wild wolves had grown.
For a while, fatal wolf attacks on livestock and other animals in New Mexico were rising too, spiking in 2019 but falling to 117 in 2023. That same year, the federal agency that investigates depredation reports raised the evidentiary bar to confirm a wolf kill, including requiring proof the animal was alive when it met a Mexican gray wolf — a move some advocacy groups said could prevent the over-attribution of livestock deaths to wolves.
In the first three months of 2025, there were 32 confirmed killings of livestock by wolves and one injury.
As the population grows, illegal wolf killings, while relatively low, are trending upward. In 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented 11 illegal wolf deaths.