President Donald Trump on Friday ordered the Interior Department to begin the process of removing endangered-species protections for gray wolves, again intervening in a long-running fight between conservationists and ranchers who say the predators threaten their operations.
Trump also ordered the Interior and Agriculture departments to make it easier for ranchers to kill the wolves if necessary. The measures, long sought by GOP lawmakers from Western states, elicited a swift rebuke from animal rights groups and could draw legal challenges.
“You’re not allowed to protect yourself, right? Or your company, your cattle,” Trump said at an Oval Office event, flanked by ranchers who shared stories of watching wolves tear through their herds. “So how do you like the idea that I’m letting you do that?”
Under Trump’s order, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will prepare a recommendation to fully delist or downlist the gray wolf and the Mexican wolf under the Endangered Species Act. The order also includes other measures intended to give states, ranchers, and hunters greater latitude to kill the animals.
“Rolling back federal protections now — or setting that process in motion — would jeopardize decades of recovery and open the door for brutal killing,” Kitty Block, president and CEO of Humane World for Animals, said in a statement.
The gray wolf and several subspecies were first listed as endangered under federal rules in the 1960s and 1970s, after centuries of westward settlement and government-backed eradication campaigns reduced their historical range in the Lower 48 states by an estimated 95%.
Federal protections and reintroduction efforts helped lift that population from about 1,000 during the early listings to more than 6,000 by 2020, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But that recovery has fueled a long-running dispute over whether the wolves still deserve strict protections. Presidents of both parties have moved to lift at least some protections, only to have those efforts stymied, and sometimes overturned, in court.
The Trump administration in 2020 stripped gray wolves of their endangered-species designation in the Lower 48 states, declaring the species recovered. A federal judge vacated that rule in 2022, and the wolves remain officially endangered in much of the country.
Congress has also entered the fray. The GOP-led House in December passed a bill to end gray wolf protections. The Senate is still considering the legislation.
“The science has been clear for years: Gray wolves are fully recovered, and their resurgence deserves to be celebrated as a true conservation success story,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R., Colorado.), who authored the legislation, said in a statement after her bill passed the House. “It’s long past time to delist them and empower states to set their own management policies.”
Ranchers on Friday discussed their frustrations with the status quo.
“The problem is, because they’re on the Endangered Species List, they can’t shoot them. They have to sit and watch them destroy their herd,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the Oval Office.
“But you can shoot them as of today,” Trump mused, to laughter.
“Well, Secretary Burgum has to do a project, but, yes,” Rollins responded.