Gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains could get another chance at federal protections after a judge in Montana ruled that a federal agency was wrong to deny an Endangered Species Act petition for them last year.
The order from U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy this week handed a win to wildlife advocates.
“I'm so excited about this court ruling because it gives me hope that someday wolves will be truly recovered across the West,” said Collette Adkins, who leads the carnivore conservation program at the Center for Biological Diversity. The center is one of the organizations that sued after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) said wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains and the Western U.S. were not at risk of extinction.
The decision doesn’t change the status of wolves, but it forces the agency to revisit the question of whether they’re endangered or threatened and should be federally protected across the West. This includes gray wolves currently under state management in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and small parts of Utah, Oregon and Washington.
In his order, Molloy said the agency’s analysis didn’t consider the best available science to determine wolf population numbers and the impacts of human-caused mortality, especially in Idaho and Montana which have expanded opportunities for wolf hunting and trapping in recent years and are proposing to kill more wolves.
FWS also didn’t give weight to Colorado, Molloy said, as an important area of the wolves’ range and where small numbers of wolves have recently been reintroduced.
“It was illegal for the service to just reject the southern Rockies out of hand by saying, ‘There's too few wolves there, we don't need to bother recovering them there,’” Adkins said. “It's exactly because there's too few wolves there that they must recover them there.”
Three hunting groups opposed to the ruling, the Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation, Safari Club International and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, filed an appeal on Thursday.
“This decision seems to hold that unless a species is not recovered across its entire historical range, then it has to stay listed — regardless of thriving populations,” Michael Jean, a lawyer for Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation, said in a press release. “It’s difficult to see how the wolf, or other listed species, will ever be deemed recovered under that standard.”
The federal government could also appeal the decision within 60 days. A spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency does not comment on litigation.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
