"We are very pleased this liberal judge did what he did," Ron Gillett told the Lewiston Tribune. "Now it will be all-out war."

He said restoring federal protection to the wolves will reinvigorate his attempts to put a ballot initiative before Idaho voters. Two previous attempts to put such an initiative before voters failed, the last one falling about 10,000 signatures short of the 45,000 needed by the May 1 deadline.

Gillette blamed the failure on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision last March to remove wolves from the endangered species list following a decade-long restoration effort. The removal led Idaho, Montana and Wyoming to plan public wolf hunts this fall.

But those plans were derailed Friday when U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in Missoula, Mont., granted a preliminary injunction restoring protections for the wolves.

Molloy will eventually decide whether the injunction should be permanent. That would force the government back to the beginning in its effort to pass management of the animals to the states.

An estimated 2,000 wolves now roam the Northern Rockies, about half of them in Idaho, according to the latest estimate by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"We said there would be no delisting," said Gillett. "We said there would be no hunting. It shows we have been right all along. People are going to see for sure how they have been lied to, and the people who didn't support us on the initiative petition last time ought to be knocking our door down. We consider this a blessing that the judge ruled this way."

Officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game have said that if such an initiative gets on the ballot and passes, federal rules protecting wolves would likely overrule any Idaho statutes calling for total wolf eradication.