GREENDALE, Wis. — When people like Nancy Jo Dowler started raising wolves here decades ago, the animals were rare in Wisconsin and nearly extinct across the country.

Now the president of the Timber Wolf Preservation Society, Ms. Dowler, 66, cares for five full-grown purebreds. She bottle-fed them as pups and howls with them at passing sirens. The other day she gave one breath mints through a hole in the fence, passing it directly from her lips to his.

Hers seems a fairy tale world compared with the legal dogfights occurring beyond these kennels. Out there, Wisconsin is three weeks into its first wolf-hunting season, sanctioned by the State Legislature in April. Minnesota is scheduled to begin its first registered wolf hunt this weekend.

The legalization of wolf hunting in both states was devised to manage a rebounding wolf population after the federal government stopped listing the species as endangered in the region last year. Both have drawn lawsuits from local and national animal rights groups that fear the undoing of nearly four decades of work to restore a healthy number of wolves.