Fight over US wolf protections heads to federal courtroom

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — U.S. government attorneys will appear before a federal judge Friday to defend a decision from the waning days of the Trump administration that lifted protections for gray wolves across most of the country, as Republican-led states have sought to drive down wolf numbers through aggressive hunting and trapping.

Wildlife advocates argue that the state-sponsored hunts could quickly reverse the gray wolf’s recovery over the past several decades in large areas of the West and Midwest.

They want U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California to put wolves back under the legal shield of the Endangered Species Act, which is meant to protect animals from extinction.

But government attorneys contend that wolves are resilient enough to bounce back even if their numbers drop sharply. There's no need to put them back under federal jurisdiction, U.S. Justice Department attorneys said in court documents filed in advance of the hearing.

The lawsuit does not cover wolves in all or portions of six states in the northern U.S. Rocky Mountains, where the animals lost protections a decade ago.

Federal officials in September said they would consider if those protections should be restored in western states in response to loosened hunting rules in Idaho and Montana. That could take a year or longer.

In Wisconsin, where hunters surpassed a state harvest quota last winter and killed 218 wolves in just four days, this season's hunt was recently put on hold by a state judge, two weeks before it was set to begin.

Conservatives on a state wildlife board had set Wisconsin's kill limit at 300 wolves, prompting a lawsuit from wildlife advocacy groups and a federal lawsuit from a half-dozen Chippewa tribes, which consider the wolf sacred.

A state agency controlled by...