Court order puts Great Lakes wolves back on endangered species list
Litigation - Article Series: from All-Creatures.org Articles Archive

FROM

Exposing the Big Game
December 2014

Wolves across the Great Lakes region are back under full protection of the federal Endangered Species Act as a result of a ruling by a federal judge Friday, December 19, in Washington.

Originally posted by John Myers on Wisconsin Wildlife Ethic-Vote Our Wildlife

Wolves across the Great Lakes region are back under full protection of the federal Endangered Species Act as a result of a ruling by a federal judge Friday, December 19, in Washington.

Judge Beryl A. Howell sided with animal rights groups in a 111-page decision stating the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went too far in removing federal protections for wolves in nine Great Lakes states in 2012.

The judge ruled that wolves in the Great Lakes states be immediately placed under the protections of the government’s 1978 ruling to protect the animals, which had been hunted, trapped and harassed to near extinction at the time.

By then only a few hundred wolves remained in the continental United States, mostly in and around Minnesota’s Superior National Forest.

Under federal protections for three decades, wolf numbers rebounded in Minnesota, with the animals spreading into Wisconsin and Michigan. State and federal wildlife managers agreed that, by 2012, wolves had recovered well beyond expectations in the region, leading the Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the Great Lakes region a “distinct population’’ of gray wolf that had “recovered’’ under the terms of the Endangered Species Act.

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