Judge halts first grizzly hunts in years
A federal judge on Thursday blocked grizzly bear hunts outside Yellowstone National Park two days before their start, postponing them for 14 days as he deliberates over lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s removal of endangered species protections for the animals.
In an order issued after a hearing in Missoula, Montana, U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen said attorneys for conservation and tribal groups had demonstrated that going ahead with the hunt could cause “irreparable harm” to Yellowstone-area grizzlies.
“The threat of death to individual grizzly bears posed by the scheduled hunt is sufficient” to warrant a delay, he wrote.
The order amounted to a temporary reprieve for as many as 23 Yellowstone-area bears that could be killed in the first grizzly hunts in the Lower 48 in more than four decades. The majority are to be hunted outside Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming, which approved the killing of up to 22 bears; Idaho set its quota at one male grizzly.
“It’s a great relief for us but also for all the people for whom these grizzly bears really are irreplaceable,” said Tim Preso, an attorney for Earthjustice, which represents several parties in one of a half-dozen lawsuits.
The federal government removed protections from grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 2017, following what Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke called “one of America’s great conservation successes, the culmination of decades of hard work.”
All U.S. grizzlies outside Alaska were listed as threatened in 1975, by which point more than a century of hunting and extermination had left as few as 136 in the Yellowstone area. About 700 of the bears now roam the park and a widening expanse outside it, according to government data, though federal biologists say the true population might be closer to 1,000.
“Bears are doing great,” Coby Howell, a Justice Department attorney, told Christensen at the hearing, adding that the animals face “no chance of extinction.”