Western Gray Wolves Wrongly Denied Protections, Judge Rules

The federal government wrongly denied gray wolves Endangered Species Act protections, a federal judge in Montana ruled Tuesday.

Judge Donald W. Molloy of the US District Court for the District of Montana vacated the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2024 finding that gray wolves in the West are not endangered or threatened under the ESA. He remanded the finding back to FWS to determine whether the species should be protected.

The service’s finding came after the first Trump administration decided in 2020 to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list, but a federal court in California later vacated the delisting decision and reinstated its protections under the ESA.

The Center for Biological Diversity and 19 other environmental groups challenged the 2024 finding last year.

Molloy ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the ESA because it used flawed state data instead of the best available science to determine wolf populations in Montana and Idaho.

The FWS previously delisted the wolf under the assumption that Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana wildlife officials would prevent its numbers from declining.

That and other FWS assumptions about the future of wolf populations were arbitrary and capricious, the judge said, because the agency didn’t consider the possibility that the states may allow wolves to decline further.

Today, new wildlife management policies implemented in Idaho and Montana have resurrected many of the widespread hunting practices that led to the wolf’s near extinction in the 1930s, Molloy said.

The Idaho and Montana legislatures both passed laws in 2021 intended to shrink wolf populations to avoid conflicts with livestock and game animals.

“There is no reasonable basis to conclude that these state management practices are adequate to protect the species,” Molloy ruled.

The Interior Department and FWS declined to comment.

“Wolves have yet to recover across the West, and allowing a few states to undertake aggressive wolf-killing regimes is inconsistent with the law,” said Matthew Bishop, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs.

“We hope this decision will encourage the Service to undertake a holistic approach to wolf recovery in the West,” he said in an email.

The case is Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. US Fish and Wildlife Service, D. Mont., No. 9:24-cv-00086, 8/5/25.