[ad_1]
The first grizzly bear hunt in the northern Rockies for nearly three decades has been blocked by a US judge who rejected the government's claims that feared predators had recovered from near-extermination.
US District Judge Dana Christensen has ordered the restoration of federal protections on Monday for more than 700 fogs in and around Yellowstone National Park.
Wyoming and Idaho were on the verge of allowing hunters to kill up to 23 bears this fall – the first planned hunt in the United States outside of Alaska since 1991.
The decision was condemned by government officials who spent months planning hunts, but there was no immediate answer to the question of whether an appeal to overturn the decision would be filed.
Christensen wrote in his decision that the case was not about the ethics of hunting. Rather, he said, the question was whether federal officials adequately considered the threats to the long-term recovery of the species when they lifted their protections last year.
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.
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, Congress intervened in 2011 to strip animal welfare measures from Montana and Idaho through 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.
The decision marks a victory for wildlife advocates and Native American tribes who filed a lawsuit when the Interior Ministry revoked federal protections. They argued that animals face ongoing threats from climate change and habitat loss.
Tim Preso, a lawyer from Earthjustice 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 lawyer with the Wyoming Farm Bureau, who represents farmers and cattle ranchers, said the restoration of protections will allow grizzly bear populations to grow safely, "putting the lives and livelihoods of people at risk. 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.
–
Associated Press authors Matt Volz in Helena and Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this story.
—
Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MatthewBrownAP.
[ad_2]
Source link
