U.S. says wolves no longer endangered

Ready to end all protections

BILLINGS, Mont. — The Obama administration on Friday proposed lifting most remaining federal protections for gray wolves across the Lower 48 states, a move that would end four decades of recovery efforts but that some scientists said was premature.

State and federal agencies have spent more than $117 million restoring the predators since they were added to the endangered species list in 1974.

Today more than 6,100 wolves roam portions of the Northern Rockies and western Great Lakes.

With Friday’s announcement, the administration signaled it’s ready to move on: The wolf has rebounded from near-extermination, balance has been restored to parts of the ecosystem, and hunters in some states already are free to shoot the animals under state oversight.

But prominent scientists and dozens of lawmakers in Congress want more wolves in more places. They say protections need to remain in force so the animals can expand beyond the portions of 10 states they now occupy.

The former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Bill Clinton said the agency’s proposal “is a far cry from what we envisioned for gray wolf recovery when we embarked on this almost 20 years ago.”

“The service is giving up when the job’s only half- done,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, who was with the agency when wolves were reintroduced in Idaho and Wyoming in the mid-1990s. She now heads the group Defenders of Wildlife.

The Center for Biological Diversity on Friday vowed to challenge the government in court if it takes the animals off the endangered species list.

The gray wolf’s historical range stretched across most of North America. By the 1930s, governmentsponsored trapping and poisoning left just one small pocket of the animals, in northern Minnesota.

In the past several years, after the Great Lakes population swelled and wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies, protections were lifted in states where the vast majority of the animals now live: Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and portions of Oregon, Washington and Utah.

Under the administration’s plan, protections would remain only for a f ledgling population of Mexican gray wolves in the desert Southwest.

The proposal will be subject to a public comment period and a final decision made within a year.