WASHINGTON – Once at risk of extinction, gray wolves have recovered enough for the government to give them less protection when they encroach on ranches and other settlements in the West, the Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday.

The switch after 30 years from “endangered” to “threatened” status means the government no longer considers gray wolves to be in danger of dying out as a species. The service will write a plan to remove the predators from the endangered species list, allowing states to manage them like other wild animals.

The move applies across the country except for the Southwest. Two populations, one in Arizona and New Mexico and another near Yellowstone National Park, will continue to be managed as experimental populations under different rules.

While threatened species still have federal protection, the lower status, among other things, allows ranchers to kill wolves they catch attacking livestock. The change was first proposed in 2000.

“Wolves are coming back,” said Fish and Wildlife Service Director Steve Williams.

But conservationists countered that the government should keep working and reintroduce wolves in regions where they remain scarce, such as the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast, rather than making the animals less protected.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on this one,” said Tom France, the director of National Wildlife Federation’s northern Rockies office, based in Missoula, Mont.

Some hunters and outfitters in the West, who have opposed reintroduction efforts, say the move doesn’t change their position.

“The only wolves we want in Idaho is one in the zoo – and neutered,” said Ron Gillett. Business at the cabins he rents near Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains has dropped sharply since wolves were moved into the region and began preying on deer and elk.

Gray wolves once lived in much of North America, but nearly disappeared from the continental United States by the 1930s, after being hunted for fur and targeted by government efforts to control predators.

The recovery effort began in the mid-1990s, when about 60 Canadian wolves were released in central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. There are now about 664 wolves roaming in 44 packs in western Montana, Idaho and in or near Yellowstone.

The population in that experimental area has been above 30 breeding pairs for three years, meeting the service’s recovery goal. Lone wolves, considered advance “scouts” of their species, also have wandered into Utah, Oregon and Washington.