The Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation and its partners, Safari Club International and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, appealed a court judgment vacating the Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) decision declining to relist gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountain region to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The coalition of sportsmen’s groups have filed a notice of appeal and will continue to fight for sound wildlife management. This latest ruling in support of the activists’ petitions would seem to demand that until wolves are recovered across the entirety of the Lower 48, including active, protective, management throughout its historic range, that all wolves everywhere should remain protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Congress declared the wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountain region (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, eastern Oregon and Washington, and north-central Utah) recovered in 2011. Since then, the wolves have thrived, and expanded into surrounding areas, including northern California, western Washington and Oregon, and Colorado. That wasn’t good enough for several animal-rights organizations who asked FWS to combine the recovered Northern Rocky Mountain wolves with wolves in the neighboring western states and list them as an endangered species.

“They asked FWS to use the wolf’s recovery against it,” said Michael Jean, Litigation Counsel for Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation. “They want to push the boundaries of the recovered population to include the areas where it is currently expanding to dilute the overall recovery.”

FWS rejected the petitions from multimillion-dollar activist groups, including Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians, Humane Society of the United States and Sierra Club. The inevitable lawsuits followed, and the Sportsmen’s Alliance intervened in each of them. District Court Judge Donald Molloy in Montana’s District Court has now ruled against FWS’ denial of those petitions.

“We had to appeal this decision,” Jean continued. “This decision seems to hold that unless a species is not recovered across its entire historical range, then it has to stay listed—regardless of thriving populations. It’s difficult to see how the wolf, or other listed species, will ever be deemed recovered under that standard.”

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