A federal judge in Missoula ruled Tuesday that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrongly denied Endangered Species Act protections to gray wolves in the West last year. 

Judge Donald W. Molloy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana ruled in favor of a coalition of environmental groups that had challenged the agency’s 2024 finding that gray wolves in the West don’t “meet the definition of an endangered or threatened species” under the Endangered Species Act. 

Molloy found that the federal agency did not use the best available science, as required under the Endangered Species Act, to analyze the threats faced by wolves and instead relied on flawed state data. 

“Ultimately, the Service made numerous important assumptions regarding the future condition of the gray wolf without considering what would happen to the species if these conditions ... were to change,” Molloy wrote. “That decision was arbitrary and capricious given the outsized reliance on these assumptions to offset reduced wolf abundance in the future, which is a certainty.” 

Those assumptions included reliance by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Idaho and Montana holding minimum wolf populations of at least 150 individuals in each state. 

Idaho’s and Montana’s commitment to manage wolves at an “extinction threshold” leaves no room for error in either population estimates or harvest regulations, the judge noted, and “there is no reasonable basis to conclude that these state management commitments are adequate to protect the species.” 

The judge ordered federal regulators back to the drawing board, directing the agency to reconsider whether the wolves should be protected.  

Environmental groups cheered the ruling Tuesday. 

“This ruling could not have come soon enough, as the wolf populations in Idaho and Montana face extermination again. Without any scientifically sound means for counting wolves and open season, including bounties on their young, their fate hangs by a thread,” said Suzanna Asha Stone, a wolf and livestock conflict specialist who served on the Yellowstone and Idaho wolf reintroduction team in the 1990s. “Only the Endangered Species Act can save them now.” 

Tuesday’s decision is “a hopeful step toward giving wolves in the Northern Rockies the federal protections they so desperately need,” said Patrick Kelly, Montana director for Western Watersheds Project. 

“These native carnivores have been subject to years of brutal, unscientific anti-wolf hysteria that has swept legislatures and wildlife agencies in states like Montana and Idaho,” Kelly said. “With Montana set to approve a 500 wolf kill quota at the end of August, this decision could not have come at a better time. Wolves may now have a real shot at meaningful recovery.” 

Officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game estimated that Idaho’s wolf population was around 1,235 wolves as of May 2024, a decrease of almost 100 wolves from the year before. 

The Idaho Department of Fish and Game is working to reduce the state’s wolf population by more than 60% over six years, the Idaho Capital Sun reported. 

According to the Idaho Gray Wolf Management Plan 2023-2028, the state’s goal is to reduce the wolf population to a yearly average of about 500 wolves, with a low of about 350 wolves, “just prior to the reproductive pulse the following year” that could bring the population to a high of about 650 wolves each spring.