Political Whiplash Is Terrible for Wolves’ Future. But More Is Coming.

There are some 2,700 wolves across Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, and seemingly just as many opinions about how they should be managed. 

In August, a federal judge from the U.S. District Court in Montana added one more to the mix when he ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to revisit its 2024 decision to keep Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves off the federal endangered species list and under the management of those three states. 

Among other missteps, the agency had not incorporated “the best available science” into its decision, Judge Donald Molloy wrote. His decision has come at a precarious time for the Endangered Species Act: The USFWS is considering revoking key protections for habitat critical to endangered species, and a handful of proposed bills before Congress would remove protections from certain animals, bypassing the agency.

The ruling is just the latest chapter in a saga that’s stretched on since 1995 over whether wolves across different regions of the lower 48 states should be listed—what Molloy calls a “political yo-yo process.” Scientists say this constant volleying could have profound consequences for wolves in the contiguous U.S., undermining the decades of work that conservationists and governments have done to bring them back from the brink. Gray wolves are still listed as endangered or threatened in the majority of states.

“Politics has basically taken over any real sense of actual wildlife biology,” said Patrick Kelly, Western Watersheds Project’s Washington and Montana state director. Western Watersheds Project is one of the 10 environmental groups that brought the case Molloy ruled on. “I was skeptical that it would come out as well as it did,” he added.

Others felt the ruling only ratcheted up the political current pulsating through wildlife management debates and won’t help wolves much.

“All it’s going to cause is frustration and anger with the ESA,” said Jess Johnson, head of government affairs for Wyoming Wildlife Federation, a wildlife and sportsman advocacy organization. She’s worried about the long-term fate of the conservation law.

Wolves are a keystone species, and their earlier decimation palpably altered the Northern Rockies’ food web, contributing to a decline in tree health and booming numbers of elk in the region, scientists say. Since their reintroduction, though, ranchers have argued that the wolves are targeting their cattle.

Those who want to keep wolves off the endangered-species list in the Northern Rockies say the animals have recovered sufficiently since their reintroduction and it’s necessary to kill substantial numbers of them to protect livestock and elk. 

“The gray wolf population has recovered, and America’s great farmers and ranchers should have the ability to protect their livestock against such threats,” said Anna Kelly, a White House deputy press secretary.

But wolves kill only a few dozen cattle annually in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming each, accounting for less than one tenth of 1 percent of all losses there, according to state and federal data. Meanwhile, in recent years, Idaho and Montana have upped the number of wolves that can be hunted and trapped.

“All of it just doesn’t make sense to me—what the states are doing versus what the statistics are of livestock loss and maintaining elk herds,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked for decades as a wolf biologist and trapper for the USFWS before retiring in 2006. “It doesn’t make sense to me as a biologist and someone who is part of this recovery effort.”

The White House did not say whether it would challenge Molloy’s ruling. The USFWS declined to comment on the litigation.

Pack Mentality

Much of the debate over whether gray wolves have fully recovered in the Northern Rockies comes down to numbers. 

In 1974, after decades of aggressive wolf elimination campaigns decimated their populations across the country, less than 1,000 wolves remained in the contiguous U.S. In the decades following, endangered-species protections and efforts to reintroduce wolves from Canada have helped build their numbers back. 

Biologists estimate that around 7,000 wolves can now be found in the lower 48 states.

But in 2011, Congress made an unprecedented decision: Rather than leaving the decision in the hands of USFWS, it stripped wolves of their Endangered Species Act protections in much of the Northern Rockies, effectively handing over the reins of management to the states in Idaho and Montana. In 2017, the USFWS delisted wolves in Wyoming. 

When a species is removed from the endangered-species list, state legislatures and wildlife agencies must adhere to species population thresholds established in consultation with the USFWS.  

As wolf populations have grown, states have adopted more aggressive hunting and trapping policies in the region, which they argue will maintain the minimum number of animals required to avoid relisting. In 2021, Idaho legislators created a reimbursement system—a bounty program, to its detractors—that pays up to $2,000 for wolves killed legally, including with all-terrain vehicles, night vision goggles and hunting dogs. Montana’s program, enacted that same year, now pays hunters up to $1,500.

Molloy, the federal judge, wrote that these approaches are “resurrecting” policies responsible for wolves’ extirpation in the first place. 

“Herein lies the problem,” said Niemeyer, who was part of the USFWS team that captured the first Canadian wolves reintroduced in the U.S. The Idaho, Montana and Wyoming legislatures, “in my opinion, they’re taking more and more liberties to dictate wildlife management, far more than 30 or 40 years ago when I was in the field.” 

He added: “They’re making more and more laws and passing bills and creating statutes that fish and game agencies have no choice but to abide by.”

In its modeling of the impact of state management plans, the USFWS acknowledged that high harvest rates could “result in large population declines.” The agency also stated that the models themselves have “key uncertainties and assumptions” and did not incorporate illegal hunting, changes in prey availability or habitat, the effects of climate change and the impact of reduced abundance on genetic health—factors that are among the top threats to gray wolves.

And though wolves in the lower 48 states now number in the thousands, sometimes even higher population sizes aren’t an accurate indicator of recovery, according to Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at University of California, Los Angeles. 

“Some species you really just want to count individuals, but when you have social species that have interesting group dynamics, like wolves, … killing a particular individual in that group could have a disproportionate effect on that group stability, on movement [and on] whether they all make it or not,” Blumstein said. 

Wolf packs are led by a dominant male and female pair, typically the only ones in their pack to breed. These pack leaders teach the rest of the group—often their offspring from recent years—crucial knowledge to survive, from the best areas for hunting to social skills. That means hunting a member of the breeding pair could cause the rest of the pack to topple. In other cases, research shows that killing wolves can sometimes result in more young wolves breeding, which can cause genetic issues within a population. 

“Killing wolves encourages more wolves to breed, even those that are relatively less ideal from a genetic health and demographic standpoint,” Bridgett vonHoldt, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, said in an email. 

In January, vonHoldt, Blumstein and a team of ecologists published a paper that outlined the genetic threats of ignoring social ecology when it comes to gray wolf recovery, and stressed how recovery and state management are falling short. 

In the recent court case, environmental groups pointed to a separate 2023 paper led by vonHoldt, which found that genetic diversity in Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves has declined over time. This suggests that gray wolves have already fallen below the minimum size necessary to avoid long-term risk of extinction. 

However, USFWS declared in an internal agency memorandum that the study’s findings were unreliable due to “confounding technical issues with the data set.” Molloy deferred to the agency’s findings in this debate, but still concluded that best science practices had not been used during the delisting decision. 

Though vonHoldt said that disagreements “are part of science,” she pointed out that the USFWS relies on an internal memo on wolf research that staff produced without involving any third party peer-reviewer, the gold standard for scientific publications. 

“Their research is (or was) not reviewed externally but they preferred to use that for making wolf management decisions,” vonHoldt said over email. She maintains that gray wolves don’t meet the standard for delisting, and that there are “nowhere near enough wolves” when social dynamics are factored into the equation.

“For every win a species experiences in protection and plan of recovery, there are legal battles that follow to undo the protection, and then re-do the fight to protect them. It’s exhausting,” vonHoldt wrote. “Science has little role in listing decisions from my experience—despite thorough, robust, and detailed research being available.”

Nathan Roberts, a professor of conservation and wildlife management at the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, disagreed. 

“There’s a consensus among the agencies, which are the experts on these issues, that wolves are recovered,” he said. In 2024, Roberts testified at a House committee hearing that the gray wolf in the United States is recovered, and that state goals are adequate to avoid extinction. More recently, Roberts spoke at a March hearing in support of the proposed Pet and Livestock Protection Act, a bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to delist the gray wolf from all lower 48 states. 

“It’s important to remember that the Endangered Species Act is not intended to tell states how to manage species once species are recovered,” Roberts said. “I think it’s unfortunate when the courts get involved in these situations.” 

However, in his decision, Molloy points to another factor that threatens genetic diversity for wolves: connectivity. The USFWS states that as long as wolf populations can move freely among habitats, inbreeding won’t be a major issue even if the number of packs dip. While analyses show high connectivity now in the Mountain West, it’s unclear that will be the case in the coming decades, especially for the Northern Rockies population—a factor that the agency failed to consider when delisting, Molloy wrote. 

“This is especially concerning given the Service’s outsized reliance on connectivity to compensate for other threats to the species’ continued viability,” his decision reads. 

States Want Fewer Wolves

Under state policies, wolves have so far stayed above the extirpation thresholds below which they would return to the endangered-species list. The states aim to keep them just above that perilous line. 

Idaho and Montana would like to reduce their wolf populations to around 500 each, down from over 1,000 per state. Wyoming, which has at least 330 wolves, aims to keep the population at 160 across a vast stretch where the animals have virtually no protections.

Western Watersheds Project’s Patrick Kelly, calls this “a war of eradication that’s disguised as wildlife management.” 

Molloy, the judge, wrote in his opinion that USFWS not relisting the animal because its numbers haven’t yet fallen below the threshold squared “with the text, though not the spirit, of the ESA.” But as long as populations remain on the right side of the brink, states’ wildlife agencies say they should be left alone to manage the animals.

“Wildlife management always involves politics, particularly with wolves because Idaho never wanted wolves,” said Roger Phillips, Idaho Fish and Game public information supervisor. Halving the state’s wolf population will be difficult to accomplish, he said, even with the new management approaches. 

“We have a long history of managing a viable wolf population in Idaho, and we will continue to do that,” he said.

“There are passionate views on all sides of the discussion about how wolves are managed in Montana. Balancing those opinions and values is contentious,” said Greg Lemon, administrator for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks’ communication and education division, in an email. The agency “will continue to do our best to follow the laws of the state and to ensure we have healthy and sustainable wolf populations in Montana for generations to come.”

Representatives from the Wyoming Game & Fish Department declined to comment, but the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a ranching trade group, praised its wolf management. 

“I would hold out that Wyoming has proven that we can do it,” said Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the group. He said he sees “no justification for any relisting decision in Wyoming.” 

In February 2024, a Wyoming man allegedly mauled a wolf with his snowmobile in the state’s vast “predator zone,” where a wolf can be killed without a permit and by any means. The state accused Cody Roberts of tying up the incapacitated animal and parading it around a local bar before ending its life. 

Roberts, indicted by a grand jury Aug. 20 on a charge of felony cruelty to animals, faces up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine. But last year, while Wyoming’s wildlife agency was run by the now-director of USFWS, its only response to the incident was to fine Roberts $250 for illegal possession of warm-blooded wildlife.

Roberts’ lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. 

This year Wyoming legislators amended the state’s animal cruelty statutes to include specific protections for wildlife and predatory animals. However, efforts to ban mauling wildlife with a snowmobile in the state have so far failed. Johnson, with the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, said she expects to see the issue revisited in future legislative sessions.

She thinks the state should still be the primary arbiter of wolf policy—“a stupid, horrific decision with one animal” shouldn’t change that, she said. Wolves remain protected in Wyoming’s national parks. The fact that the state has not substantially changed its wolf management approach since 2017 is evidence to Johnson that lobbying on behalf of the animal has paid off in the legislature.

Over the course of his 33-year career in wildlife management, Niemeyer has watched wolves reemerge as cornerstones of Western culture, however controversial. As the former USFWS wolf recovery coordinator, Niemeyer supervised wolf management in Idaho, tracking, relocating and, very rarely, killing wolves. His work was instrumental in the process that resulted in states taking over the animal’s management. 

Now, in his opinion, their approaches go too far. He wishes Idaho, Montana and Wyoming would “show great restraint” in the number of wolves they kill each year.

“I can go have a beer with a lot of them who are college-trained individuals like myself, and they don’t like what’s going on,” he said of state wildlife specialists. “But in an interview, you’re never going to hear that from them because we want to keep our job.”

The ESA in the Crosshairs?

Johnson thinks the key to changing the culture of wolf management is to focus on the states, where she believes lobbying is more effective than lawsuits.

“Consistent involvement [from] conservation and wildlife groups at a state legislative level—and I do mean consistent, I mean every day of the session, their face is in the room; I don’t mean parachuting in when the bill concerns you, I mean being there even when the bills don’t—that changes landscapes,” Johnson said.

Kelly and his colleague Dagny Signorelli, Western Watersheds Project’s Wyoming and Northern Utah director, disagree. State management has not helped create social acceptance for wolves in the Northern Rockies, Signorelli said. She added that her group does not lobby in Wyoming at all because of “how entrenched livestock interests are,” preferring instead to focus on the federal government and the courts.

Niemeyer believes much of the acrimony surrounding wolf management is baked into the culture in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, where skepticism of and hostility toward the federal government is as common as sagebrush.

“‘The federal government dumped them on us against our will. Now we’re in charge, and this is how we’re going to manage wolves: We’re going to kill them,’” Niemeyer said, embodying for a moment the attitude he believes some lawmakers have adopted—and, to a certain degree, amplified.

Another round of litigation could be on the horizon. 

Magagna, with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, thinks USFWS “is in a difficult position,” and he is “anxious to see” the Trump administration and the three states appeal Molloy’s ruling.

Johnson worries that more lawsuits puts a spotlight on the Endangered Species Act under “an administration that, frankly, is very unfriendly” toward the law. “Wolves are going to be around in 10 years,” she said. “I don’t think the Endangered Species Act is if this keeps up.”

Signorelli and Kelly approach the battle over wolves differently than Johnson, but they share her concern about the law’s fate. 

“The foxes are in charge of the hen house,” Kelly said, and repealing the ESA is “absolutely a real risk with this Congress and this administration.”

After decades helping wolves reestablish themselves in the Northern Rockies and witnessing fast-growing human population growth and development in the region, Niemeyer said he hardly recognizes the political landscape around him.

It’s like “I’m living on an alien planet right now,” he said. “The Endangered Species Act is good. I just know that these species got to have a place to exist, and they’ve got to have space. And if we don’t have a law like that, then humans aren’t going to police themselves.”