Aug 5, 2025 | News Release

Today, a federal district court in Missoula ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act (ESA) when it determined that gray wolves in the western U.S. do not warrant federal protections. Today’s ruling means  that the Service’s finding that gray wolves in the West do not qualify for listing is vacated and sent back to the agency for a new decision, consistent with the ESA and best available science.

In January, 10 conservation groups challenged the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s denial of their petitions to list a western U.S. distinct population segment (DPS) of gray wolves under the ESA, or alternatively, to relist the northern Rocky Mountain DPS, which Congress “delisted” in 2011. A species is delisted when it is removed from the list of threatened and endangered species. Despite denying that the petitioned protections were warranted, the agency also concluded that laws and regulations in Montana and Idaho “designed to substantially reduce” wolf populations are “at odds with modern professional wildlife management.”

The court ordered the agency to go back to the drawing board and re-analyze threats to the gray wolf population in the West in accordance with the requirements of the Endangered Species Act, including the requirement to use the best available science. Specifically, the court noted the agency failed to consider the species’ lost historic range throughout the West in its assessment, neglected to properly evaluate whether wolves in Colorado qualify as a significant portion of its range, failed to properly evaluate threats to wolves on the West Coast, failed to apply the best available science on population estimates and genetic threat from small population size, incorrectly assumed connectivity amongst wolves in the West would continue (despite high levels of mortality in the Northern Rockies), arbitrarily relied on state commitments to stop killing wolves at certain thresholds (without considering what would happen if they were breached), failed to account for unlawful take, and relied on inadequate state and federal regulatory mechanisms.

Despite today’s win, wolves remain in the political crosshairs. In January, Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced H.R. 845 to strip ESA protections from gray wolves across the lower 48. If passed, this bill would congressionally delist all gray wolves in the lower 48 the same way wolves in the Northern Rockies were congressionally delisted in 2011, handing management authority over to states. Regulations in Montana, for example, allow hunters and trappers to kill several hundred wolves per year—with another 500-wolf quota proposed this year—with bait, traps, snares, night hunting, infrared and thermal imagery scopes, and artificial light.

The conservation organizations that filed the case are Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians, International Wildlife Coexistence Network, Predator Defense, Protect the Wolves, Trap Free Montana, Wilderness Watch, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Clearwater, and Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment. They are represented by the Western Environmental Law Center. Two other groups of conservation organizations also sued the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for its decision to deny the petitions to protect wolves across the West. The three cases were consolidated and heard together on June 18 in Missoula, Montana.

“The Endangered Species Act requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to consider the best available science, and that requirement is what won the day for wolves in this case,” said Matthew Bishop, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “Wolves have yet to recover across the West, and allowing a few states to undertake aggressive wolf-killing regimes is inconsistent with the law. We hope this decision will encourage the Service to undertake a holistic approach to wolf recovery in the West.”

“We feel vindicated by today’s ruling. Anti-wildlife politicians in the Northern Rockies are managing wolves back to the brink of extinction, and it has to stop,” said Lizzy Pennock, carnivore coexistence attorney at WildEarth Guardians. “Today’s ruling is a huge step in the right direction, finally putting us back on the path to protecting this imperiled and iconic native species.”

“Today’s ruling represents a hopeful step towards giving wolves in the Northern Rockies the federal protections they so desperately need,” said Patrick Kelly, Montana director for Western Watersheds Project. “These native carnivores have been subject to years of brutal, unscientific anti-wolf hysteria that has swept legislatures and wildlife agencies in states like Montana and Idaho. With Montana set to approve a 500 wolf kill quota at the end of August, this decision could not have come at a better time. Wolves may now have a real shot at meaningful recovery.”

“This ruling could not have come soon enough, as the wolf populations in Idaho and Montana face extermination again. Without any scientifically sound means for counting wolves and open season, including bounties on their young, their fate hangs by a thread,” said Suzanne Asha Stone, a wolf and livestock conflict specialist who served on the Yellowstone and Idaho wolf reintroduction team in the 1990s. “Only the Endangered Species Act can save them now.”

“We’re hoping that this ruling is an important step toward finally ending the horrific and brutal war on wolves that the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming have waged in recent years—including allowing and encouraging the wanton slaughter of wolves deep within Wilderness areas,” said George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch.

“Today’s ruling is an incredible victory for wolves. At a time where their numbers are being driven down to near extinction levels, this decision is a vital lifeline,” saidBrooks Fahy, executive director of Predator Defense.

“Since wolves can’t go to court, we had to go to court for them,  We spoke for the wolves and the wolves won!” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
 

We have much work ahead, but this is a remarkable leap forward in safeguarding gray wolves in the Northern Rockies and securing their rightful place in the ecosystem!

Judge Donald Molloy rebukes the Fish and Wildlife Service for ignoring irresponsible, politically driven state policies that are putting wolves at risk

By Wayne Pacelle

In a detailed and damning 105-page ruling issued yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy in Montana took the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to task for illegally denying protections to gray wolves in the western United States. He reminded us that in the 1930s, gray wolves were driven to near extinction, holding on only in the far reaches of northeast Minnesota in the lower 48 states. That was no accident of history or the consequence of ecological change. It came “at hands of men,” Judge Molloy wrote, “acting on an anti-predator narrative, not science.”

Today, in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, there’s palpable animus toward wolves and the stirrings of hatred and persecution—legalizing year-round killing, using snowmobiles to exhaust and run over and crush wolves, turning packs of dogs loose to engage in open-air fights with them, baiting neck snares and steel-jawed traps, and paying bounties for a piece of their hides.

None of that can be classed as sound conservation. It all adds up to a scorched earth policy—maliciously aimed at the first species in the human story to exhibit sociability with us, which ultimately led to the domestication of dogs and the joyous and life-changing relationships we have with their descendants.

Judge Molloy was methodical in his criticisms of the FWS in siding with Animal Wellness Action, the Center for a Humane Economy, and other plaintiffs and remanding the question of restoring federal protections for wolves back to the agency for re-examination. “The state management regimes in Montana and Idaho changed dramatically in 2021, resurrecting many of the management practices and policies responsible for the prior extirpation of the gray wolf from the West,” Molloy wrote. Animal Wellness Action attorney Kate Schultz, who argued our case before Judge Molloy, noted that “the Fish and Wildlife Service has two choices right now: appeal to the Ninth Circuit, or go straight back to the drawing board. The district court here found the Service’s analysis was riddled with errors.”

My colleague noted that high degree of difficulty in the FWS taking a course other than restoring federal protections for wolves. “It’s like trying to cure a cancer that has metastasized to nearly every organ system. The agency’s line of argument was flawed at its core. It just doesn’t get it, and it seems to have excused the states’ unacceptable policies without warrant.”

Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy led one of three tranches of animal welfare and environmental groups who sued the FWS in this case. But if there was any one incident that caused us to say “Enough!” and to take on this case, it was the reprehensible actions of a Wyoming man named Cody Roberts.

Early last year, Roberts, who was better known as a hound hunter of lions, ran over a young female wolf with his snowmobile. After crushing her but not killing her, he took her captive, taped her mouth shut, dragged her into a bar, and tortured her for hours before finally killing her in the dim light behind the building where he had celebrated the mortal injuries he had inflicted on her for no good reason.

Despite our demands for justice, and a worldwide spotlight on Roberts’ savagery, state authorities took no practical action to address his handiwork—declining to pass a sound state law to forbid chasing down wolves and other wildlife with snowmobiles. There were some politicians who spoke up about the cruelty, but they quickly backpedaled as the shrill voices of the ranching community opposed doing anything substantive. Jim Magagna, the executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, told legislators that “… we’re seeing attacks on the tools that we’ve used. … We simply cannot afford, as an industry, to lose more of the tools that we may need.” The lobbyist for the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, in speaking about a measure to forbid using snowmobiles to run down animals, said, “I don’t think this bill is needed.”

Then a federal lawmaker representing Wyoming denounced a federal bill, the Snowmobiles Aren’t Weapons Act, to ban the use of motorized vehicles to chase down wolves with snowmobiles on federal lands, claiming that, “Our Western issues and way of life is completely foreign” to proponents of this legislation.

The effect of these comments was to remind so many observers that these states have no guardrails for wolves, and they don’t plan to build those guardrails anytime soon. They treat the wolves not as wildlife to be managed but as trespassers to be wiped out—even the wolves who stray just across the border of Yellowstone National Park and onto other federal lands abutting it. Even Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, unethically trapped a wolf right outside of Yellowstone, apparently without any concern that wolf-watching in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone generates tens of millions of dollars in economic activity for rural gateway communities.

Wolves Are Nature’s Frontline Defense Against Disease

With all the vitriol and false claims from wolf haters, one crucial behavioral truth has been subordinated in the debate: wolves not only bring a broad array of benefits to ecosystems, in terms of stream and forest health, but they are our best line of defense against the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a contagious, fatal neurological disease now quietly eating away at the brains of deer and elk across the West.

CWD first disorients infected animals and then kills them. There is no cure. No vaccine. The disease is so dangerous and moving so inexorably that it threatens the long-term viability of deer and elk populations. That means it indirectly threatens a hunting industry that generates hundreds of millions in revenue and that is so culturally significant in rural parts of the West. Some scientists also warn of CWD’s zoonotic transfer potential—meaning that hunters and hunting families risk consuming the infectious prion and contracting the human variant of the disease. CWD has hit elk in 34 states and provinces, and it’s on the march.

Nature though does have one trump card to play: active predation from wolves and lions.

Gray wolves selectively prey on animals afflicted by CWD, removing them from the population and deactivating the deadly prions. It’s ecological cleansing at its finest—and it comes free of charge to state wildlife agencies. As Dr. Jim Keen, our director of veterinary sciences, puts it: “The predatory behavior of wolves may be the only way to arrest the spread of CWD and cleanse wild cervid populations of this brain-wasting disease.”

Disease biogeography shows that CWD prevalence is significantly lower, or non-existent, in regions where wolves and other large predators are present in healthy numbers. In the Upper Great Lakes region, for example, where gray wolves prey on white-tailed deer, the disease has been kept largely at bay. And in Greater Yellowstone—where wolves, mountain lions, and bears maintain ecological balance—deer and elk herds are far healthier than in predator-depleted areas outside of the park.

Even major pro-hunting groups like the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership have called CWD “the biggest threat to the future of deer hunting.” Yet states like Montana and Idaho continue to actively incentivize people to wage war on the very predators who keep disease in check. It requires a special measure of disassociation to tout a commitment to hunting rights while assaulting the species that, at no cost, protects the long-term viability of deer and elk populations that sustain the quarry needed for the hunt.

A Critical Moment for Wolves—and for Wildlife Policy

Judge Molloy’s ruling is an important ruling, but its effects are unclear. It could be a cautionary treatise about Congress’s ham-handed intervention in ESA listing matters. It was, after all, a legislative rider in 2011 that removed federal protections for wolves in the northern Rockies and sent us down the path that Molloy summarized in such detail yesterday.

To be sure, the Molloy ruling will influence the debate over H.R. 845, introduced by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and S. 1306, introduced by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., to remove federal protections for wolves across their range outside of the northern Rockies. If the delisting experiment with the northern Rockies failed so badly, as evinced by Molloy’s dressing down of the FWS, we should not replicate that same sort of politically driven delisting action and toss that stink bomb into a dozen other states.

If you care about wolves, the most urgent fight is to block H.R. 845 and S. 1306 and not to allow Congress to repeat its prior error in prematurely removing federal protections for wolves in the northern Rockies.

Illegal bird trapping equipment seized in raid

10 hours agoShareSave

Eleanor Lawson

BBC News, West Midlands

Police have seized illegal bird trapping equipment after carrying out a raid at an address in Wolverhampton.

West Midlands Police said officers supported a joint agency warrant in relation to a wildlife crime investigation on Wednesday, attending an address on Stowheath Lane, Bilston.

No arrests were made but some illegal trapping equipment was seized.

The West Midlands Ringing Group, who supported the police with the raid, said a suspect was believed to be catching and selling wild finches.

A spokesperson for the group said: “We were proud to support our local police on a wildlife crime warrant.

“No birds were found, but illegal trapping equipment was seized [including] lime sticks.”

Lime sticks are covered in an adhesive material.

A spokesperson for West Midlands Police said inquiries were ongoing.