(Reuters) – A federal judge on Thursday restored endangered species protections for the gray wolf in some U.S. states, reversing a Trump administration decision that allowed the animals to be hunted.
The decision affects wolf populations in the upper Midwest, Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. States there had been given the authority to manage their local wolf populations, including allowing trapping and hunting, when Endangered Species Act protections were lifted in 2020.
In his ruling, Jeffrey White, a U.S. District Court judge in Montana, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2020 decision, which had cited the recovery of two wolf populations in the Great Lakes and Northern Rocky Mountains, had failed to adequately assess threats to the entire species.
“Instead, the Service avoids analyzing these wolves by concluding, with little explanation or analysis, that wolves outside of the core populations are not necessary to the recovery of the species,” White wrote.
The conservation groups that sued the federal government had argued that the species had yet to recover in much of its former range.
The Interior Department, which oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and defended the Trump policy in court, said it was reviewing the decision.
In its decision in 2020, the Trump administration said the species had been brought back successfully from the brink of extinction. There are about 6,000 gray wolves in the lower 48 United States, up from about 1,000 when they were added to the endangered species list in the 1970s.
The ruling does not apply to wolf populations in the Northern Rocky Mountain states of Idaho and Montana, which recently have taken steps to loosen wolf hunting restrictions. The FWS is currently evaluating a request to re-list those wolves.
In an editorial in USA Today earlier this week, Interior Secretary Debra Haaland voiced concern over the weakening of wolf protections by certain states.
“We must find solutions that allow wolves to flourish, even while we balance the needs of hunters and ranchers and others who live and work along with wolves on the landscape,” Haaland wrote.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom in Los Angeles; Editing by Sandra Maler)
