On November 3, 2020, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service (“Service”) published a final rule removing the gray wolf (canis lupus) from the federal list of Endangered and Threatened Species in the lower 48 United States and Mexico. The rule will take effect on January 4, 2021. At the same time, the Service denied a petition, filed by environmental groups, to maintain protections for the gray wolf in the lower 48 United States. However, the Service did maintain the separate listing of the Mexican wolf subspecies as endangered, a listing that was put in place on January 16, 2015; the Service also maintained the separate listing of the red wolf, which was declared extinct in the wild in 1980 but survives in a captive breeding program and a reintroduced experimental population.
The Service’s rule has already drawn a threat of litigation from a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, who have sent the Service a notice of intent to sue to overturn the rule. It could also potentially be subject to repeal under the Congressional Review Act (“CRA”), which allows Congress to negate administrative rules by passing a joint resolution of disapproval within 60 legislative days of a rule’s submission to Congress, although the likelihood of that outcome will depend on the final composition of the Senate following the upcoming runoff elections in Georgia.
The gray wolf was originally protected in 1967 under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, a predecessor to the Endangered Species Act, which was enacted in 1973. In 1978, the gray wolf was listed as endangered throughout the lower 48 United States, except for the population in Minnesota, which was listed as threatened. At that time, the Minnesota wolf population was the only major U.S. population in existence outside Alaska (where gray wolves were never listed as threatened or endangered), and numbered about 1,200 individuals, including an isolated population of about 40 wolves on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. In 1995 and 1996, 66 wolves from southwestern Canada were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho; wolves from Canada have also recolonized parts of the lower 48 United States. As we reported in March 2019, when the new rule was proposed, the Service now estimates that there is a Great Lakes meta-population with approximately 4,400 individuals, and a Rocky Mountain/western Canadian meta-population with...
