When U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy placed wolves in the Rocky Mountains back on the endangered species list in 2010 the main impact was hunting.

Ranchers still have been able to have wolves killed that attack their livestock with little argument. The Obama administration has been treating the relisted wolves much the same way the states had been without the hunting.

But Molloy asked attorneys on all sides Jan. 28 a troubling, but obvious question: Can wolves in the Rockies still be considered “experimental and non-essential?”

That was the status of the wolves when they were reintroduced to Yellowstone and Idaho in 1995 under section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act. It allowed the federal government to write special rules that made it easier to kill marauding wolves so that the restoration had less impact on ranchers.

But the law required that the experimental populations be “wholly separate geographically from non-experimental populations of the same species.” One of the major legal and scientific points federal lawyers made in their defense of delisting wolves is that with more than 1,500 wolves spread from the Canadian border south to Wyoming and Utah there is no danger of genetic isolation or inbreeding.

It’s going to be hard for the federal government's lawyers to argue that the Rocky Mountain wolves are separate from Canada’s population. They are caught in a legal paradox.

They argue that wolves have recovered and should be managed by the states of Idaho and Montana with liberal killing, which the population can take. But because of Wyoming’s unwillingness to increase its rules to the minimum they consider necessary, they can’t delist along a state line.

Molloy wants his answer by Feb. 22. His question came after the Obama administration issued its proposed rules for managing the wolves and said they planned to keep them “experimental and non-essential” and to allow liberal take as they do now, even allowing wolves to be killed to help big game herds.

Molloy’s question comes as many in Congress are seeking a nearly unprecedented delisting by law. A bill that would have removed wolves from the Endangered
Species list in Idaho and Montana while leaving them endangered in Wyoming, came very close to passing in December.

Only Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s opposition to a provision that would have required Idaho to keep at least 500 wolves kept it from passing. Otter also wanted the law to say if wolf numbers dropped low enough to require relisting, they would again be managed as an experimental, non-essential population.

The issue of whether wolves in Idaho and Yellowstone were wholly separate from Canada’s populations was always a challenge to reintroduction. Wolves from Canada had been dispersing south since the 1960s when British Columbia began treating them as a game animal. Idaho clearly had at least one pack in Bear Valley near Lowman in the early 1990s but they were quickly poisoned.

I followed wolf tracks with biologists in 1992 along Bear Valley Creek where others had heard howling.

There also were wolves around Kelly Creek in north-central Idaho and wolves were even seen in Yellowstone. But federal biologists said without confirmed packs individual wolves did not make a population.

The issue went to court and the federal government won, defeating the Idaho Farm Bureau and Earthjustice on the point.

But now wolves are here to stay, the experiment a success or failure depending on what side you are on. And the experiment continues, examining the social challenges of restoring large carnivores to a landscape filled with people.