Breaking News: Great Lakes Wolf Killing Stopped‏

Court Reverses Bush Decision to Strip Protection From Wolves in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan

Breaking News! Agreeing with a Center for Biological Diversity legal action, a federal judge today overturned a 2007 Bush administration decision to remove Great Lakes area wolves from the endangered species list. The ruling puts an immediate halt on the killing of hundreds of wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

While the Great Lakes wolf population has increased to 4,000 individuals under the protective cover of the Endangered Species Act, the species is still missing from most of its historic range, including the Northeast, the southern Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the West Coast.

Rather than developing a national wolf recovery strategy, the Bush administration craftily abandoned wolf recovery in most of the country by delisting wolves in the Great Lakes and the northern Rocky Mountains and declaring that the lack of wolves in other areas relieves the administration of any responsibility to continue recovery actions.

In today's ruling, the judge agreed with the Center's amicus argument that stripping protection from local populations while refusing to consider the recovery of wolves throughout the lower 48 appears to violate the central purpose of the Endangered Species Act. The precedent setting ruling will protect hundreds of species from this backdoor strategy of abandoning species recovery.

This is the second major victory in two weeks for the Center's wolf recovery fund. On September 16, the government announced it would give up defending against our northern Rockies wolf lawsuit.

Thanks for supporting the wolf defense fund and sending thousands of emails and petitions objecting to the slaughter of wolves in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. This victory couldn't have happened without your help. Thanks also to our litigation allies at the Humane Society, Help Our Wolves Live, the Animal Protection Institute, and Friends of Animals and Their Environment.

Kierán Suckling Executive Director Center for Biological Diversity

P.S. We'll keep a close watch on the administration in case it tries to reissue its wolf-killing decision again before leaving office

The Chicago Tribune September 29, 2008

Court rules against US in Great Lakes wolf case
By John Flesher

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - A federal court has overturned the government's decision to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list for the Great Lakes region. The ruling Monday was in response to a lawsuit filed by several environmental groups, including The Humane Society of the United States. The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., says the 2007 decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was not supported by the federal Endangered Species Act. The ruling affects wolves in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The decision comes nearly a week after the agency asked a judge in Montana to place gray wolves in the Northern Rockies back on the endangered list after proposing to remove them earlier this year.

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Gray wolf photo courtesy of Tracy Brooks/USFWS