The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Missoula heard a yearslong case on Tuesday that could reshape Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies and beyond.
The hearing moves forward a debate stemming from 2011, when a federal Congressional budget bill rider removed wolves from the endangered species list in Montana, Idaho and portions of other states. Ever since, the species has fallen under state rather than federal management, and has involved a hunting season to control the population.
Congress had stepped in to end years of a lupine tug-of-war in the courts, but that delisting didn’t end the drama over wolf protections. In 2021, the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation groups petitioned the federal government for an emergency relisting of wolves in the Northern Rockies, citing threats from state laws that encouraged what they viewed as aggressive wolf hunting. Around the same time, another petition asked the federal government to list wolves across the entirety of the Western U.S. — not just in Montana and Idaho.
Those petitions kicked off half a decade of agency analysis and legal back-and-forth that culminated in Tuesday’s hearing.
In 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that as the population has expanded in range, wolves in the Northern Rockies no longer constituted a “distinct population segment,” or DPS. “In the Western United States, the gray wolf currently occurs in one interconnected metapopulation with packs distributed across California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, and, more recently, wolves have been documented in Colorado,” the agency wrote.
“When populations of pretty much any species become smaller, uncertainty necessarily increases.”
Kate Chupka Schultz, senior attorney, Center for a Humane Economy
This new argument meant that wolves in the Northern Rockies should be analyzed as part of the broader whole of Western wolves, rather than a separate population, according to the FWS. However, the agency also found that wolves across the West did not face enough threats to warrant protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Conservation groups again sued and last year a federal district court ruled that the agency’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.” The federal government along with three states and hunting groups appealed, and the Ninth Circuit heard arguments from both sides in Missoula on Tuesday.
Department of Justice attorney Emily Polachek argued that the lower court judge ignored important precedent, cherry-picked science and misinterpreted several important pieces of agency findings.
“The judgment in this case must be reversed,” Polacheck told the three-judge panel.
Arguments on both sides centered around what role a species’ historic range should play in its present-day recovery, what constitutes the “best available science,” and how human-caused mortality — especially hunting and poaching — could impact the future of wolf populations across the West.
“The court should affirm the district court in this case because [FWS] has again misinterpreted the law, dodged key scientific evidence and inadequately assessed the threats to the wolf in the western United States,” argued Margie Robinson, a staff attorney for Humane World for Animals.
Clinton-appointed Judge Richard C. Tallman seemed especially skeptical of plaintiffs’ arguments about the role of historic range. “Back to the question I’ve been wrestling with all morning,” he said, referencing a lengthy debate over wolf habitat. “Where do we draw the line?”
The argument echoes debates about species from grizzly bears to wolverines: for a species that once lived in broad swathes of habitat across the U.S. but was extirpated from the vast majority of its habitat, what constitutes a truly recovered range?
“We are certainly not arguing that wolves need to be returned to every square inch of their former habitat,” Robinson said. “The question is whether or not they’re absent from major geographical areas that are biologically important to the species.”
Plaintiffs also said the federal government failed to grapple with basic uncertainty around how many wolves are on the landscape and specifically cited Montana’s new wolf population estimate — which reduced the species’ estimated population size in the state by about 34 percent.
“When populations of pretty much any species become smaller, uncertainty necessarily increases,” argued Kate Chupka Schultz, senior attorney with the Center for a Humane Economy.
However, Robinson fired back that states like Montana and Idaho are dedicated to making sure their respective wolf populations don’t reach levels low enough to warrant relisting the species. That, according to Robinson, would trigger a return from state management to the federal government. “The states have an active interest in maintaining the viability of these species,” she said.
The judges heard three separate wolf cases on Tuesday morning and did not indicate a timeline for making a decision. “You’ve given us a lot to think about,” Trump-appointed judge Daniel Bress said after the hearing.
If the federal government wins the case, wolves in the Northern Rockies will remain off the endangered species list, according to FWS’ previous findings. If the lower court’s decision is upheld and plaintiffs emerge victorious, the federal government will have to re-analyze whether wolves in the western U.S. deserve ESA protections.
Meanwhile, wolf hunting season in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming is already underway. Hunters have harvested 17 of the maximum quota of 22 wolves in Wyoming’s trophy game management area south of Yellowstone National Park. There’s no limit on wolf harvest in the rest of the state. In Montana, a wolf management unit just north of the park closed in late September when it met its quota of one wolf. Eleven wolves have been harvested across Montana as a whole. Up-to-date data on the Idaho wolf hunt isn’t publicly available.
