Wyoming approves first grizzly hunt in decades
A Wyoming wildlife commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to approve the state’s first grizzly bear hunt in more than four decades, a proposal that could lead to the killing of as many as 22 bears just one year after Yellowstone-area grizzlies were removed from the endangered species list.
Grizzly bears in the Lower 48 were federally protected in 1975, when only about 136 of the animals remained in and around Yellowstone National Park. Their numbers had rebounded to about 700 by last year, prompting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the Yellowstone population and leave its management to the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Montana in February decided against opening a trophy hunt, and Idaho, home to the smallest number of grizzlies, this month approved a fall hunt of a single male bear.
Under Wyoming’s proposal, a maximum of one female or 10 male grizzlies could be killed this fall inside the state’s section of a federally designated “demographic monitoring area” — a zone of “suitable” bear habitat where biologists track the species’ population. Another 12, male or female, could be hunted outside that area. No hunting will be allowed inside Yellowstone, nearby Grand Teton National Park or the road that connects them. The Wyoming plan also includes a no-hunt buffer zone in a region east of Grand Teton where several bears adored by photographers and tourists are known to roam and den.
Federal biologists say limited hunting is unlikely to harm the overall grizzly population in the Yellowstone area, and Wyoming officials have described their proposal as conservative. “The question is not whether you hunt grizzly bears or not,” Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican, told C-SPAN earlier this month. “The question is whether grizzly bears have grown enough in terms of population and in habitat that they can be a sustainable species. And clearly they have.”
But the hunting plan faced heavy opposition from conservationists and others who say it will imperil a population that was only recently deemed to have recovered.
“Allowing a trophy hunt of these majestic animals — the second-slowest mammal to reproduce in North America — so soon after they lost Endangered Species protections does nothing to build public confidence in state management of grizzly bears,” Bonnie Rice, a Sierra Club representative who spoke in opposition to the plan at the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission’s meeting on Wednesday, said in a statement after the vote.
Several suits have challenged the delisting of Yellowstone grizzlies, and a U.S. District Court judge earlier this year ordered all parties to combine their arguments. A decision is expected before the September start of hunting seasons in Wyoming and Idaho.