The AP is reporting that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will voluntarily withdraw its ill-conceived and illegal regulation stripping Northern Rocky Mountains gray wolves of their protections under the Endangered Species Act. If the government does withdraw its wolf “delisting” rule, it would be a major step forward in NRDC’s campaign to protect the wolf. The delisting was recently put on hold by a federal judge in Montana, who found that the wolf population had not yet met the federal government’s own recovery goals. Hopefully, the agency will now reexamine those criteria, which were always patently inadequate. The reintroduction of the gray wolf into Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana is one of the Endangered Species Act’s greatest success stories and wolves are well on their way to recovering in the region. But they are not there yet.
