Alaska officials on Tuesday resurrected a controversial bear-killing program aimed at boosting caribou numbers.
The Alaska Board of Game, convening in a special meeting in Anchorage on the subject, authorized the state Department of Fish and Game to restart the program that has already killed 186 brown bears, five black bears and 20 wolves.
Board members and department officials said they had fixed legal flaws that prompted two state judges earlier this year to overturn the program and cut short the bear culls that state officials argue are needed to help the ailing Mulchatna caribou herd in Western Alaska.
State officials say the program is needed to help the faltering herd recover to levels that would allow hunting to resume.. Critics, including environmentalists and wildlife biologists outside of the Department of Fish and Game, say the program is scientifically unsound and that factors other than bears are behind the herd’s decline.
Board members said department officials, in presentations during the two-day meeting, had provided compelling evidence that predation by bears is the main reason for the herd’s problems.
And the board has an obligation to do whatever it can to allow residents of the region to resume their hunts of caribou, said one member, Vice Chair Stosh Hoffman of Bethel.
“The department is giving us a lot of good science and, it all made sense to me,” Hoffman said on Tuesday just prior to the approval vote. “I listened to the public and weighed everything, but the most important part of this is this herd has been identified for high use of harvest for Alaskans to eat and put away. And it’s been closed now for several years, since 2021.”
The Mulchatna herd peaked in the late 1990s at about 200,000 animals. It is down to a little under 15,000 animals now, according to the Department of Fish and Game. But that is an improvement from the lowest point, when the herd dipped below 13,000, department officials said, and they attributed the change to the past few years of predator control.
The department’s goal is to have the herd grow to between 30,000 and 80,000 animals, enough to allow hunting to resume.
Department officials and board members also said the program will be safe for the overall bear population – targeted for relatively small areas that are used by the caribou herd for calving and limited to the spring season when calves are born. That is to limit the number of calves that are killed and eaten by bears, they said.
Doug Vincent-Lang, the department’s commissioner, promised that if any information emerges that the bear population’s sustainability is at risk, officials will adjust to protect the bears.
“We were trying to rebuild the caribou herd, but we’re not going to jeopardize long-term sustainability of bears in so doing,” he told the board on Tuesday, prior to the approval vote.
The bear-killing program has been mired in controversy since it began.
It was originally authorized by the Board of Game in early 2022, but critics said that board members circumvented normal public processes when they granted that approval. The first bear kills were carried out in 2023. That year and the following year, 175 brown bears were killed through aerial shooting, along with five black bears and 19 wolves, according to the department.
In March, Alaska Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi ruled that the program violated provisions of the state constitution on multiple grounds. He found that state officials failed to provide meaningful public notice or opportunities for public comment and participation in the decision process and that the state had failed to analyze the program’s impacts to bear populations, thus violating the constitution’s requirement for sustainable management of natural resources.
Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin followed up in May with a ruling that pronounced the bear-killing program to be still void for this year, despite emergency action reauthorizing it, because the department and board had failed to fix the problems that Guidi identified in his earlier ruling.
Nonetheless, the Department of Fish and Game launched its bear-culling program days later, on May 10. Eleven brown bears were killed that weekend by state actions that Rankin concluded had violated court rulings. The activities stopped after she issued a restraining order.
Critics of the program disagree that bears are to blame for the Mulchatna herd’s decline.
Environmentalists and other critics of the program have pointed to habitat changes in the region that have made it less suitable for lichen-eating caribou, though more suitable for browsers of woody plants like moose. They have also pointed to disease and past overhunting as possible contributors.
The critics also say the department has failed to show that the bear-killing program will not harm the region’s bear population.
Among the opponents is the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, which filed the lawsuit that resulted in the rulings against the program. The alliance mobilized a petition drive that it said drew 65,000 signatures opposing the action that the board ultimately took Tuesday. Additionally, there were 1,500 written comments submitted in opposition to the program, the alliance said.
Nicole Schmitt, the organization’s executive director, told board members that she had no illusions about her abilities to convince them to change their minds about this predator control program.
“I think the decision around this proposal has largely been made, and we acknowledge that,” she said in testimony at the board meeting on Monday.
Nonetheless, she told board members, the alliance has submitted proposed amendments to clarify the objectives, establish specific measures of success and ensure that the program is limited in geographic scope and season.
As written, the program would allow the department to kill bears by aerial gunning in a 40,000 square mile area, with nothing limiting activities to the calving grounds or calving season, she told the board. The area borders Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, she said. And the area is only 30 miles from Katmai National Park and Preserve and less than 50 miles from the state-managed McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, both of which are world-class bear-viewing destinations that support state tourism, she said.
“I think the dismissal from the state of that bear-viewing argument is a misleading reflection of what this program, what this proposal is actually asking for,” she said.
The board rejected the alliance’s suggested amendments.
The legal fight over bear culls in the Mulchatna caribou range is not over.
A hearing is scheduled in state Superior Court on July 25 on a petition to find the Department of Fish and Game in contempt of court for proceeding with bear kills in May, contrary to orders by both Guidi and Rankin.