The Alaska Board of Game on Thursday approved state officials’ request to continue a controversial predator control program in Western Alaska, even though a judge ruled two weeks ago that the bear-killing program violated the state constitution.
The board granted an Alaska Department of Fish and Game petition for emergency action to carry out a third season of shooting bears and wolves to keep them from preying on the ailing Mulchatna Caribou Herd. In the past two years, the predator control program — carried out in late spring and early summer within the herd’s range — killed 175 brown bears, five black bears and 19 wolves, according to the department.
The emergency finding is warranted to help a herd that fell from a peak of about 200,000 in the late 1990s to about 13,000 now, too low to allow any hunting, board members said on the final day of a weeklong meeting in Anchorage.
“Right now, we have a herd that has shut down where a large number of people in Western Alaska can’t put caribou in their freezer right now. And it’s not going to grow if they don’t have calf survival,” said Stosh Hoffman, a board member from Bethel.
People in the region need to be able to hunt caribou because other food sources are uncertain, Hoffman said.
“We’re in tough times out here. A lot of things are changing. The salmon is in big decline. Our moose population, everyone knows it’s going to tip over real soon, like new moose populations tend to do. When they crash, they crash hard,” he said. He noted that the Alaska Federation of Natives, at its last convention, unanimously supported a resolution in favor of Mulchatna predator control.
But Nicole Schmitt, executive director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, said she was “shocked” at what the department and the board did.
“We just think it was a complete betrayal of the public process,” Schmitt said. Emergency regulations in the past have closed hunting, not opened or reopened predator control, she said. “This says to me if the board wants something done, they will manufacture an emergency to that end.”
The Alaska Wildlife Alliance is considering how to respond, she said. We’re looking at something that includes a legal response, as well as other options,” she said.
The Department of Fish and Game submitted the petition for emergency action last Friday, on the first day of the regularly scheduled Anchorage meeting.
While department officials say the predator removals done to date have resulted in increased calf births that help the herd, opponents say factors like habitat change rather than predation are behind the herd’s population decline.
Opponents also say that the program threatens populations of bears, including those that frequent the well-known bear-viewing areas in Katmai National Park and Preserve.
The Alaska Wildlife Alliance filed a lawsuit in 2023 that resulted in the ruling against the program.
Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi ruled on March 14 that it was carried out in violation of public-notice and public-comment requirements and that it violated the state constitution’s sustained-yield mandate by failing to adequately evaluate impacts to bear populations.
At the Board of Game meeting, there was debate among members about whether adequate public notice and opportunities for public comment had been given this time. Some members argued for a separate meeting. But the majority, by a 5-2 vote, decided to deal with the matter Thursday, the last day of the weeklong meeting.
The vote to authorize the program’s resumption passed by a 6-1 margin. Member John Wood, who agreed with others that the matter qualified as an emergency but had expressed some concerns about proper public notice, was the lone dissenter.
Ryan Scott, director of the department’s Division of Wildlife, said the program can start imminently. To be effective, it has to be carried out in the late spring and early summer, during the calving season, he said.
The department is poised to start its third season of the Mulchatna predator control, he told Board of Game members.
“It’s not about beginning to gear up. We are full tilt. We have contracts in place, we got fuel moving,” he told the board. Though the court ruling has implications for proper processes to follow, the department is treating the matter as having some urgency, he said. “I mean, 30 days from now, we’ll probably be putting people in the field,” he said.