Delisting the Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf from the US Endangered Species Act: an assessment of political discourse over 20 years

Feared, revered, and politicized, wolves have long captured human imagination, and ignited fierce conservation conflicts. In the United States, the Endangered Species Act protects species at risk of extinction from human impacts. This far‐reaching legislation, which impacts development and state‐level wildlife management, has been fraught with legal battles and controversy. The gray wolf, first listed in 1974, exemplifies the tumultuous back‐and‐forth of listed species. In 2011, Congress, rather than wildlife management agencies in the executive branch of government, delisted the gray wolf in two Northern Rocky Mountain states using legislative action, specifically a rider on a budget bill. Since then, gray wolf territory has expanded, and controversy over gray wolf management prevails. Our study used quantitative structural topic modeling to assess political discourse surrounding the Rocky Mountain gray wolf delisting in newspapers and other documents between 2005 and 2025, allowing us to assess how different stakeholders discuss the gray wolf and how language has shifted over time. In our study, we find that nongovernmental organizations are generally the most vocal in gray wolf discourse. Further, our results show that the 2011 delisting shifted the language used by a variety of stakeholders when debating gray wolf management, with the 2011 delisting being used as both a cautionary example and a model to follow.