{"id":22324,"date":"2021-01-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/case\/our_work-cases-2009-gray-wolves-in-the-northern-rockies\/"},"modified":"2023-01-30T10:29:38","modified_gmt":"2023-01-30T18:29:38","slug":"gray-wolves-in-the-northern-rockies","status":"publish","type":"case","link":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/case\/gray-wolves-in-the-northern-rockies","title":{"rendered":"Defending Gray Wolves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--\n\nGray wolves have come perilously close to extinction in the Rocky Mountains. Only in the past decade has the wolf population rebounded from a population of less than 50 to more than 1,500 wolves today. Visitors come to Yellowstone every year to get the chance to see and hear wolves in the wild.\n\nIn September, 2008, the Bush administration moved to reinstate federal Endangered Species Act protections for wolves, by asking a federal court for permission to withdraw its March 2008 decision to drop protections for wolves in the northern Rockies. On March 6, 2009, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar affirmed the decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove gray wolves from the list of threatened and endangered species in the western Great Lakes and the northern Rocky Mountain states of Idaho and Montana and parts of Washington, Oregon and Utah.\n\nOnce again, Earthjustice has turned to the courts to protect the gray wolves of the northern Rockies from attempts to deprive wolves of necessary legal and habitat protections. On June 2, 2009, Earthjustice filed suit on behalf of conservation groups challenging the decision to delist the wolves. In August 2009, Earthjustice sought an emergency injunction to halt wolf hunts in Idaho and Montana.\n\n--><\/p>\n<p>One of North America\u2019s most iconic native predators, the gray wolf used to be found throughout the United States \u2014 but centuries of trapping, hunting, and poisoning, decimated the wolf population. By the 1980s, only a few small pockets of survivors remained in the continental United States.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protected gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act in 1978, and efforts to reintroduce the gray wolf to the Northern Rockies in 1995 ultimately succeeded. By 2005, the population had finally climbed above 1,000 animals. Despite this encouraging recovery, there have been and continue to be state management policies pushing for aggressive population reductions in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.<\/p>\n<p>For the past two decades, Earthjustice has been instrumental in court in protecting the gray wolves.<\/p>\n<p>Most recently, on behalf of our clients, Earthjustice challenged a rule issued by the Trump administration that removed Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves in the lower-48 states except for a small population of Mexican gray wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. The administration made the decision despite the science that concludes wolves are still functionally extinct in the vast majority of their former range across the continental U.S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of North America\u2019s most iconic native predators, the gray wolf used to be found throughout the United States \u2014 but centuries of trapping, hunting, and poisoning, decimated the wolf population. By the 1980s, only a few small pockets of survivors remained in the continental United States. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protected gray&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14812,"template":"","tags":[130,149,155],"offices":[15,110],"cases":[42],"goals":[14],"class_list":["post-22324","case","type-case","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-biodiversity","tag-endangered-species-act","tag-wolves","offices-biodiversity-defense-program","offices-northern-rockies-office","cases-gray-wolves-in-the-northern-rockies","goals-biodiversity"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/case\/22324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/case"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/case"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22324"},{"taxonomy":"offices","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/offices?post=22324"},{"taxonomy":"cases","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cases?post=22324"},{"taxonomy":"goals","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earthjustice.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/goals?post=22324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}