BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The Biden administration on Friday asked an appeals court to revive a Trump-era rule that stripped remaining Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves in the U.S.
If the measure is successful, the predators would come under state supervision and hunting could resume in the Great Lakes region after it was halted by a court order two years ago.
Environmentalists successfully sued when wolf protections were lifted in the final days of former President Donald Trump.
Friday’s filing in the 9th U.S. District Court of Appeals was the first explicit step by President Joe Biden’s administration to revive that rule. Protections will remain in place pending the court’s decision.
The lawsuit comes amid years of political unrest as wolves have re-spread in some areas of the western U.S., sometimes attacking livestock and eating deer, elk and other large game.
Environmental groups want this expansion to continue, as wolves still occupy only a fraction of their historical range.
Efforts to eliminate or reduce wolf protections date back to former President George W. Bush’s first term more than two decades ago and have continued through every subsequent administration.
They once roamed most of North America, but were wiped out en masse in the mid-1900s by government-sponsored trapping and poisoning campaigns. Gray wolves were given federal protection in 1974.
Every time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declares they have recovered, the agency is taken to court. Wolves in various parts of the U.S. have lost and regained protection several times in recent years.
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is focused on a recovery concept that allows wolves to thrive on the landscape while respecting those who work and live in the places that support them,” said Vanessa Kauffman, agency spokeswoman.
The government is on the same side in this case as cattle and hunting groups, the National Rifle Association and Republican-led Utah.
The Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Humane Society of the United States and other groups oppose it.
“While wolves are protected, they’re doing very well, and if they lose their protection, that recovery is going to be set back,” said Collette Adkins of the Center for Biological Recovery. “We won in the district court for good reason.”
She said she was “saddened” that officials were trying to restore Trump administration rules.
Efforts to restore wolves have been limited to a handful of regions. Federal officials last year agreed to develop the first-ever national recovery plan by December 2025 under a settlement in a separate lawsuit.
Kauffman declined to say whether the national plan would still be pursued if the government wins the case in the 9th Circuit.
Lawyers argued in court proceedings Friday that the government is prepared to move forward with the recovery of the gray wolf now that the species is no longer threatened with extinction.
“The ESA (Endangered Species Act) is clear: its purpose is to prevent extinction, not to restore species to their original range and numbers,” wrote attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Congress bypassed the courts in 2011 and stripped federal protections in the northern U.S. Rocky Mountains. Since then, thousands of wolves have been killed in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Lawmakers continue to push for state control in the western Great Lakes region. When those states briefly gained jurisdiction over wolves under the Trump administration, trappers and hunters using dogs exceeded harvest targets in Wisconsin, killing nearly twice as many as planned.
Hunts have been held in Michigan and Minnesota in the past, but not in recent years.
Wolves are present, but they are not allowed to be hunted in public in states such as Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado. They have never been protected in Alaska, where tens of thousands of the animals live.
The Biden administration last year rejected requests from conservation groups to restore protections for gray wolves in the Northern Rockies, a decision that has also been challenged.
State lawmakers in that region, which includes Yellowstone National Park and vast wilderness areas, plan to exterminate more wolf packs. But federal officials determined that the predators were not in danger of being wiped out entirely under the states’ relaxed hunting regulations.
The U.S. is also home to small, struggling populations of red wolves in the Mid-Atlantic region and Mexican wolves in the Southwest. Both of these populations are protected as endangered.
