The Obama Administration will publish in the Federal Register its rule removing wolves from protection of the Endangered Species Act in the Rocky Mountains Thursday and 11 environmental groups announced today they will challenge the decision in court.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar went along with his scientists and managers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and decided to delist wolves in Idaho and Montana, which have approved wolf plans and in eastern Oregon and Washington and northern Utah. They left out Wyoming because its plan was rejected by a federal judge mostly because it allowed anyone with a gun to be able to shoot a wolf on sight.

The issue of removing federal protection along a state line is the major point of challenge for the environmental groups who have been running a series of advertisements with pictures of cuddly wolf pups that declare wolf management should be based on "sound science."

"State borders don’t mean much to wolves---they don’t know Wyoming from West Virginia," said Sylvia Fallon, Natural Resources Defense Council scientist. “We agree that Wyoming’s plan is inadequate, but you cannot have protections start and stop at state lines, particularly when genetic interchange between the packs is essential for the wolf’s long-term survival.”

They will use the Department of Interior’s own long-time policy for their case, which said wolves in the Northern Rockies constitute a single population and could not be broken up on a state-by-state basis. A 2003 Fish and Wildlife Service memo on wolves, said: “We cannot use a boundary between states to subdivide a single biological population in an effort to artificially create a discrete population.”

But they also will make the same argument they did when they successfully stopped delisting in 2008: that the plan does not preserve the genetic diversity and mixing of wolf populations to protect them long term.

The federal government spends a great deal of space demonstrating that: “Wolves in northwestern Montana and both the reintroduced populations are as genetically diverse as their source populations in Canada; thus, inadequate genetic diversity is not a wolf conservation issue in the Northern Rocky Mountains at this time.”

The 60-day-notice of their intent to sue will be filed Thursday by Earthjustice on behalf of NRDC, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, The Humane Society of the United States, Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Friends of the Clearwater, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Oregon Wild, Cascadia Wildlands Project, Western Watersheds Project, and Wildlands Project.

This time around environmentalists are raising the stakes. Just raising the genetic diversity issue in the Northern Rockies raises question about population in the Midwest. And then there is the Mexican Gray wolf that might never reach the 1,500 wolf level reached in this region.

So they are going to an administration that they hope will lean more their way to urge instead a national solution.

“A real solution is going to require a national plan that sets recovery goals based on the latest science and ensures natural genetic interchange for the packs in the region,” said Andrew Wetzler, Director of NRDC’s Endangered Species Project. “Anything else is likely to fall short of what is required by the law and just gets in the way of a long-term solution for all the parties involved.”