US wolves to regain federal protections in most states

Order is expected to reverse damage to wild canines caused after protections were removed in final days of Donald Trump administration

Grey wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming continue to fall under state jurisdiction (AFP via Getty Images)

A district judge in the US has restored the federal protection for grey wolves across most of the country.

Oakland district judge Jeffrey White said on Thursday that the US Fish and Wildlife service had failed to show wolf populations could be sustained in the Midwest and portions of the west without protection under the Endangered Species Act.

He added that the agency, taken to court by wildlife advocates last year, did not appropriately consider threats to wolves outside those core areas.

Thursday’s ruling will cover a majority of the grey canines but will not impact wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and some portions of adjacent states. The grey wolves in these regions continue to fall under state jurisdiction after federal protections were removed by Congress in the last decade.

Judge White’s order is expected to reverse the damage to wild canines caused after the protection was removed in the final days of the Donald Trump administration. As a result of the move, the predators were exposed to hunting.

The Trump-era order was slammed by critics who said it would undermine wolves’ rebound from widespread extermination in the last century.

Defendants from the Biden administration told the court that despite the removal of the protections, wolves were resilient enough to bounce back notwithstanding the sharp dip in their numbers due to intensive hunting.

Melissa Schwartz, interior department spokesperson, said that the US Fish and Wildlife service was reviewing Thursday’s decision.

The recovery of grey wolves from near-extinction phase has been championed as a historic conservation success but it still remains at stake.

This has, in turn, led to severe criticism from hunters and farmers who are flustered about rising wolf attacks on their big game herds and livestock, as they point out that the protections are no longer warranted.

An “extremely disappointed” president of the Farm Bureau, Zippy Duvall, said that the district court ruling ignored wolves’ recovery beyond population goals prescribed by the government.

Republican state senator Ed McBroom said that the courts were “simply forcing citizens to take matters into their own hands”.

“It’s really frustrating and outrageous that some judge thousands of miles away is suddenly telling us that our own scientific management of the species can’t be trusted,” Mr McBroom said.

Wildlife advocates have welcomed the decision from Judge White, stating that it will put an immediate end to hunting in the Great Lakes region — the same area where at least 218 wolves were killed in a span of just four days in a wolf hunt last year.

“Wolves in the Great Lakes region have a stay of execution,” said John Horning with the environmental group WildEarth Guardians.

Additional reporting by agencies