A gray wolf (Canis lupus) USFWSGray wolves in the western Great Lakes region are to remain on the US endangered species list, according to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The decision, announced on Tuesday (August 1), upholds a district judge’s 2014 ruling that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (USFWS) efforts to remove federal protections for the animals in 2011 had been premature.
“The second highest court in the nation reaffirmed that we must do much more to recover gray wolves before declaring the mission accomplished,” says Noah Greenwald, director of the endangered species program at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “Wolves are still missing from more than 90 percent of their historic range in the lower 48 states, and both the Endangered Species Act and common sense tell us that we can’t ignore that loss.”
The USFWS, part of the Interior Department, had previously justified its decision to delist the animals after segmenting American gray wolf populations into three groups based on their geographical range. The service argued that one of these segments—a population living in the western Great Lakes region that now counts ...
