Seventeen conservation and wildlife protection groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging a federal decision to delist or downlist the gray wolf in the lower-48 states, under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The lawsuit was filed in Portland's U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes that gray wolves in the lower-48 states are now recovered and can be "downlisted" from an endangered status to the less protective threatened status under the ESA. Downlisting would allow states to take over species management. In 16 eastern and southern states, the wolf was completely delisted or stripped of ESA protection in the Service's April 1 ruling.

The conservation and wildlife groups worry that many western state legislatures are overtly hostile to wolves - Idaho calling for the extermination of the species "by any means necessary."

"Wolves in a few places have rebounded in the seven years since they were returned to Yellowstone and Idaho, but the federal government is abandoning the wolf before the species recovery is complete," said Brian O'Neill, attorney to the groups involved in Defenders of Wildlife et al v. Norton. "It hardly seems appropriate to hand the wolf over to state legislatures, which seem to be tripping over one another to write increasingly inflammatory anti-wolf rules."

Wyoming, for example, has dual classifications for the wolf - as a trophy animal inside Yellowstone and surrounding wilderness areas, but as a predator anywhere else in the state. Predators can be killed by anyone, anywhere for any reason.

"The long-term survival of wolves in the Northern Rockies cannot be assured with the poorly conceived and politically tainted wolf management plans emerging from places like Wyoming," said Kirk Koepsel, director of the Wyoming chapter of the Sierra Club.

Gov. Dave Freudenthal said Deputy Attorney General Mike O'Donnell is trying to get a copy of the pleadings.

"We will need to look at the pleadings to make a decision whether we try to intervene and help defend the decision," he said.

"Frankly between the federal government meddling in our lives and other interest groups meddling in our lives you sometimes wonder if the people of Wyoming get much of a chance to say what's going to happen," he said.

Wyoming Farm Bureau spokesman Marvin Applequist blasted the lawsuit.

"Lawsuits and fund raising using the wolf issue has been an important tool for these organizations in the past and we suspect this is still the case. Their goal will be reached when hunting is a thing of the past and livestock is removed from the land," he said.

Jim Magagna, vice president of Wyoming Stockgrowers, was optimistic that this lawsuit might ultimately help. "I'm glad we can get some of these issues decided and out of the way before the wolves can be completely delisted," he said. "This may actually expedite the process."

Ed Bangs, wolf recovery specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said recently that officials currently believe there are 747 wolves in the three Western states, compared with 663 last year.

Officials believe there are 161 wolves in Montana, 240 wolves in Wyoming and 346 wolves in Idaho. Last year, there were 183 wolves in Montana, 217 in Wyoming and just 263 in Idaho.

Michael Scott, executive director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition of conservation groups, summarized the thrust of the lawsuit:

"What this is about is whether or not the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is obliged to help recover a species across its historic range, and whether the Service can arbitrarily change its recovery goals regardless of the underlying science," Scott said.

The original recovery plan for the gray wolf in the West ultimately envisioned wolves across a historic range that included Washington, Oregon, northern California, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Instead, the Service has declared itself content with an experimental population of wolves centered on Yellowstone and spreading into Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, Scott noted.

Parties to the suit are Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, American Lands Alliance, Animal Protection Institute, Center for Biological Diversity, Forest Watch, Hells Canyon Preservation Council, Help Our Wolves Live ("HOWL"), The Humane Society of the United States, Klamath Forest Alliance, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility ("PEER"), Minnesota Wolf Alliance, Oregon Natural Resources Council, RESTORE: The North Woods, Sinapu, and the Wildlands Project.

Star-Tribune staff writer Joan Barron contributed to this article.