Biden administration upholds federal protections for wolves

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife service has denied two petitions from hunting advocacy groups to reduce federal protections for gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act.

The petitions asked the agency to recognize wolves in western Great Lakes states, including Minnesota, as a distinct subpopulation and delist them, and also to reduce protections on wolves in parts of Oregon, California and Washington.

The hunters argued that wolf populations have surpassed initial recovery goals in the Great Lakes region, and that populations in the West Coast states are growing fast enough to merit downlisting.

The Fish & Wildlife Service disagreed, ruling that the petitions “do not present substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that the petitioned actions may be warranted.” The move is the latest in a longstanding tug-of-war between environmental advocates who want to see wolf populations protected, and hunters who either believe the wolves are devouring local deer populations or who simply want to shoot the animals themselves.

“Today, our federal government did not bow to the will of those who want to see wolves exterminated at the expense of sound science and ethics,” said Amanda Wight of the U.S. Humane Society, in a statement. “Gray wolves are already absent from most of their historic range. On top of that they face immense persecution from trophy hunters, trappers and agribusiness.”

The Sportsmen’s Alliance, one of the groups petitioning for reduced protections, dismissed the ruling as “a politically motivated farewell folly from the Biden administration.”

The administration, however, has a record of favoring loosened protections for wolves. Biden initially kept in place a Trump-era change that removed Endangered Species Act protections for wolves across most of the U.S. That change was ultimately reversed by a federal court in 2022.

Biden’s Department of Justice subsequently asked a federal appeals court in September to remove Endangered Species Act protections for wolves.

“The ESA (Endangered Species Act) is clear: its goal is to prevent extinction, not to restore species to their pre-western settlement numbers and range,” attorneys with the Department of Justice wrote in that petition.

In 2020, the Trump administration stripped ESA protections for most gray wolves in the U.S. Among other things, that ruling allowed the state of Wisconsin to allow a wolf hunt in February 2021. Hunters subsequently shot far more wolves than allowed by the state’s quota in a matter of days.

Conservationists point to that incident as a warning sign of what could happen if the fate of wolves is left up to the states, as the hunting groups are advocating.

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