Protections restored for grizzlies; blocked hunts

FEATURE 2011: A grizzly bear roams Beaver Lake in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo.

(Associated Press)

BILLINGS, Mt. – A US judge ordered the reinstatement of federal protections for grizzly bears in the northern Rocky Mountains on Monday, a measure that blocks the first grizzly hunts planned in the 48 states of Lower Canada in nearly three decades.

Wyoming and Idaho were on the verge of allowing hunters to kill up to 23 bears this fall. US District Judge Dana Christensen delayed the hunt twice and the last order blocking them was due to expire later this week. Hunting was reported to be the first in the United States outside of Alaska since 1991.

Christensen wrote in his decision that the case was not about the ethics of hunting. On the contrary, he said, the question was whether federal officials adequately considered the threats to the long-term recovery of the species when they protected more than 700 bears living around the National Park. Yellowstone.

According to the judge, the answer was no.

He noted that about 50,000 bears traveled across the contiguous United States and stated that it would be "simplistic at best and dishonest at worst" not to consider the status of grizzlies outside the region. Yellowstone, one of the few areas where they rebounded.

State and federal officials reacted with disappointment. Wyoming Governor Matt Mead said the decision was further evidence of flaws in the Endangered Species Act and the need for Congress to make changes.

"Grizzly bear recovery should be considered a conservation success," Mead said in a statement.

An attempt to remove protections for gray wolves in the region has encountered similar legal problems over the past decade. In this case, the Congress intervened in 2011 to strip animal guarantees by legislation, paving the way for public wolf hunting.

The pressure to lift bear protection and allow hunting has increased in recent years as the number of bear-to-person conflicts increases. Most of these conflicts involve attacks on livestock, but bears sometimes attack people, such as a Wyoming hunting guide killed earlier this month by two grizzlies.

WYOMING, IDAHO GRIZZLY HUNTER TUN HUNTS ARE WAITING

The decision marks a victory for wildlife advocates and Native American tribes who filed a lawsuit when the Home Office revoked federal protections last year. They argued that animals face ongoing threats from climate change and habitat loss.

Tim Preso, an EarthJustice lawyer who represented a large number of plaintiffs, said Christensen's decision made it clear that the government had acted too quickly to remove the protections because the bears are missing a lot of their historical range.

"Putting blinkers on anything other than the Yellowstone grizzlies was illegal," he said. "We tried to stop them, but they refused to do it."

Hunting and farming groups and the National Rifle Association had intervened in the case to maintain grizzly bear management under state control.

Cody Wisniewski, a representative of the Wyoming Farm Office, said the restoration of the protections would allow grizzly bear populations to develop without "compromising the lives and livelihoods of Westerners who have settled in the area for a long time."

Grizzlies living in Yellowstone and around Yellowstone were classified as Threatened in 1975 after most bears were killed in the early part of the last century and the population was only 136 animals.

Government biologists say Yellowstone grizzlies are thriving, have adapted to changing diets and are among the best managed bears in the world.

US Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Jennifer Strickland said the agency was reviewing Monday's decision, but was supporting its decision to lift the protections.

The agency initially declared a successful recovery for the population of Yellowstone in 2007, but a federal judge ordered that protections be maintained while wildlife officials were investigating whether the decline of a major food source – white pine seeds – could threaten the survival of bears.

The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded last year that it had attacked this threat and all other threats and said that grizzlies were no longer a threatened species requiring restrictive federal protections for them and their habitat.

This decision entrusted the management of the bear to the states, which agreed on a plan setting hunting quotas based on the number of deaths each year to ensure that the population remains greater than 600 animals.

The federal agency committed to lifting federal protections for another group of about 1,000 bears living in Glacier National Park in Montana and the Bob Marshall Desert, but first wanted to see how Christensen is doing. pronounced on the Yellowstone affair.

Complainants' lawyer, Matthew Bishop, of the Western Environmental Law Center, said the agency should review these plans in light of Christensen's decision.

"The idea of ​​recovering grizzly bears in the Lower 48 should always be on the table, they should not get away with this single piece radiation approach," Bishop said.