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(Our happy-hour fact to amaze your drinking buddies with.)

The gray wolf was removed from the Endangered Species Act's "threatened" list last week for the first time in three decades.

The decision means that the resurgent wolves can now be shot and killed if they step outside Yellowstone National Park, which worries many conservationists.

Decades after being eliminated from Yellowstone by hunters, the animals were gradually reintroduced in the 1990s. They have since thrived on a diet of bison, elk and sheep, with numbers rising to 1,500 in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

We're cautiously happy for the wolves -- everyone likes a good comeback, and we will soon need every predator we can get to protect against the inevitable python invasion.

But there is also something threatening about the comeback. We haven't been very good to the wolves over the years, and if there's any animal that's capable of taking revenge on our soft human flesh, it's the gray wolf. Gulp.