BILLINGS (AP) — The Biden administration on Friday asked an appeals court to reinstate a Trump-era rule that lifted remaining Endangered Species Act protections for the U.S. gray wolf.
If successful, the measure would put these predators under state oversight nationwide and pave the way for the resumption of hunting in the Great Lakes region, which was halted by court order two years ago.
Environmentalists filed and won lawsuits when wolf protections were lifted in the final days of former President Donald Trump’s term.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in the 9th U.S. District Court, was the first clear step by President Joe Biden’s administration to reinstate the rule. The protections will remain in place until a court decision is reached.
The lawsuit comes after years of political conflict over wolves’ resurgence in parts of the western U.S., attacking livestock and preying on larger animals such as deer and elk.
Environmental groups hope that wolves’ range will continue to expand, as they still occupy only a small fraction of their historic range.
Efforts to lift or reduce protections for wolves date back to the first term of former President George W. Bush more than two decades ago and have continued under subsequent administrations.
Gray wolves once ranged across most of North America, but were largely wiped out by government-sponsored hunting and poisoning programs by the mid-1900s. Gray wolves became federally protected in 1974.
Every time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declares wolves recovered, the agency has been challenged in court, and wolves in different parts of the country have lost and regained protections multiple times in recent years.
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is focused on the concept of restoration, where wolves thrive on the lands they inhabit while respecting the people who work and live in the places that support them,” said agency spokeswoman Vanessa Kauffman.
The administration is taking the same stance on the issue as livestock and hunting groups, the National Rifle Association and the Republican-led state of Utah.
Groups including the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Humane Society of the United States oppose the move.
“Wolves do very well while they are protected, but when those protections are removed their recovery goes backwards,” said Collette Adkins of the Center for Biological Diversity. “There are good reasons why we won in district court.”
She said she was “sad” that authorities were trying to reinstate the Trump administration’s rule.
So far, efforts to bring wolves back have been limited to a few pockets, but federal officials agreed earlier this year to develop the first-ever nationwide recovery plan by December 2025 as part of a settlement in a separate lawsuit.
Kaufman declined to say whether the national plan would remain in place if the government wins its case in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
But lawyers suggested in court filings Friday that the government is ready to move on from its wolf protection efforts because the animals are not endangered.
“The ESA is clear: its purpose is to prevent extinction, not to restore species to pre-western abundance or range,” Department of Justice lawyers wrote.
A 2022 ruling that reinstated the protections said wildlife officials had failed to prove that wolf populations in parts of the Midwest and West were sustainable. The authorities also had not adequately considered threats to wolves outside of core areas, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of California said.
More than 4,000 wolves live in the Great Lakes region, and more than 2,000 in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Northwest states.
Congress circumvented the courts and stripped federal protections in the northern Rocky Mountains in 2011. Since then, thousands of wolves have been killed in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Lawmakers continue to push for state management in the western Great Lakes region, where states temporarily gained jurisdiction over wolves under the Trump administration, and dog-wielding trappers and hunters drastically exceeded their target for wolf capture in Wisconsin, killing nearly twice as many as planned.
Hunts were once conducted in Michigan and Minnesota, but have not been conducted in recent years.
Wolves exist but are not publicly hunted in states such as Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado, and they have never been protected in Alaska, where tens of thousands of wolves live.
The Biden administration last year rejected a request from conservation groups to reinstate protections for gray wolves across the northern Rocky Mountains, a decision that is also being challenged.
State lawmakers in the region, which includes Yellowstone National Park and a vast wilderness area, are eager to eliminate more wolf packs, but federal officials have determined that state hunting restrictions have not put wolves at risk of disappearing entirely.
The United States is also home to small, endangered populations of red wolves in the Mid-Atlantic and Mexican wolves in the Southwest, both of which are protected as threatened.
