(CN) — Several conservation groups are suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its denial of their petitions to protect gray wolves in the Rocky Mountains under the Endangered Species Act.
“We’re back in court to save the wolves and we’ll win again,” Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “The Fish and Wildlife Service is thumbing its nose at the Endangered Species Act and letting wolf-hating states sabotage decades of recovery efforts. It’s heartbreaking and it has to stop.”
On Monday, the center filed its complaint in federal court in Montana alongside The Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society Legislative Fund and Sierra Club. In another suit — also filed in Montana’s federal court but on Sunday — Western Watersheds Project led another coalition of conservation groups seeking the same relief: federal protections for gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains region.
Altogether, the groups contend that the service unreasonably denied two petitions from 2021 to restore federal protections for gray wolves in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, north-central Utah and the eastern portions of Oregon and Washington state — protections that the service eliminated in 2011 and 2012. According to the center, the service made its decision even though it estimates that subsequent state laws relating to wolf killing could reduce the population from 2,534 wolves to as few as 667.
“We will not idly stand by while the federal government erases decades of wolf recovery by permitting northern Rockies states to wage war on these animals,” Margie Robinson, staff attorney for wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement. “Under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cannot ignore crucial scientific findings.”
Instead of allowing states to cater to trophy hunters, trappers and ranchers, Robinson said that the service must preserve wolves for the critical role they play in ensuring healthy ecosystems. Other opponents of the service’s “not warranted” finding worry that the agency’s decision will encourage other western states to adopt the aggressive wolf killing practices of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.
“The current killing regimes in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming put wolves at obvious risk of extinction in the foreseeable future and this core population is key to wolf survival in the West,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of Western Watersheds Project, in a statement.
The “regimes” Molvar cites include Montana state laws that allow hunters to kill wolves with bait and strangulation snares and provide individual hunters with permits to kill 10 wolves and trap up to 10 more with an extended wolf-trapping season. Similarly, the state of Idaho allows permitted hunters to kill an unlimited number of wolves — even while using hounds and all-terrain vehicles — while the state of Wyoming allows anyone in most parts of the state to kill wolves without regulation.
Notably, the lawsuits arrive a week after a report surfaced relating how a man in Daniel, Wyoming, ran down a wolf with a snowmobile — disabling the animal — before keeping it at his residence, taping its mouth shut and then bringing it to a local bar on Feb. 29, 2024, to shoot it out back for show.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department cited the unnamed man $250 for a wildlife violation.
Outside of the Rocky Mountains range, gray wolves enjoy federal protections under the Endangered Species Act nationwide. The service nearly eliminated those protections in 2020, explaining that the wolves have successfully recovered since landing on the Endangered Species list in 1978.
Critics said the agency based its decision on flawed legal analyses and junk science; the government’s own experts said the delisting proposal lacked sufficient scientific evidence and was premature. A federal judge vacated the service’s rule in 2022, reinstating gray wolf protections in 45 U.S. states.
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