The state’s latest plan to kill bears in part of Western Alaska to try to boost a flagging caribou population has drawn a new legal challenge.
Environmental groups on Monday filed a lawsuit in state Superior Court that seeks to strike down the Alaska Board of Game’s July approval of a controversial predator control program in the part of the state used by the Mulchatna caribou herd.
The lawsuit, filed by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity, is the latest step in a legal and political battle over state efforts to increase the herd size. It names the board, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the department’s commissioner as defendants.
The lawsuit argues that the revived program approved by the Board of Game suffers from many of the same flaws that were in the previous program. That program had been approved by the board in 2022 but was overturned by court rulings earlier in the year that resulted from a previous lawsuit filed by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.
Two state judges found that the program, under which 186 brown bears, five black bears and 20 wolves have been killed since 2023, violated the elements of the Alaska constitution.
Monday’s lawsuit says the new predator control program is largely the same as the old one and it continues to violate the Alaska constitution’s requirement for sustained yield of natural resources. For Alaska, the principle of sustained yield holds that renewable resources should be managed so that they can exist indefinitely.
There are two ways that the sustained yield requirement is violated, according to the lawsuit.
The board, when it approved the predator control plan presented by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, “failed to take a hard look at brown and black bear population data” for the targeted area, thus failing to properly consider impacts to those populations, the lawsuit said.
And the plan has no end point, meaning there is no trigger for suspension of predator control if bear populations drop below a minimum threshold deemed necessary for their sustainability, the lawsuit said.
“The Board of Game gave the Alaska Department of Fish and Game the authority to aerially shoot any bears of any age across 40,000 square miles until 2028, with no population data or cap on the number of bears killed,” Nicole Schmitt, executive director with the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.
She noted that the southeast border of the targeted area is only 3 miles from Lake Clark National Preserve, 30 miles from Katmai National Park and 50 miles from McNeil and Brooks Falls, sites that are world-famous for the large numbers of brown bears that gather there to fish for salmon. Meanwhile, the western border reaches two national wildlife refuges, “which means this program threatens bears who move across vast stretches of public lands,” she said.
Cooper Freeman, Alaska director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the program “a disgraceful misuse of public resources and a betrayal of the trust Alaskans place in their wildlife managers.”
“There’s no excuse for the state of Alaska to be gunning down bears from helicopters,” Freeman said in the statement.
The commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game defended the program, though he did not specifically address the claims in the new lawsuit.
“ADF&G is committed to all users of the herd in rebuilding this population, which has been identified as important for providing high levels of human consumption under state statute and regulation,” Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang said in a statement.
Vincent-Lang said “intensive management,” or IM, has shown to be helping the caribou herd. Intensive management is the term Alaska wildlife managers use for predator-control programs.
“There is strong evidence that neither disease nor nutrition are preventing this herd from recovering. Department predator removal efforts in the Mulchatna caribou herd IM program are administered to reduce wolf and bear populations in small, defined areas for short periods of time, to enhance caribou calf survival and to increase herd abundance,” Vincent-Lang said in his statement. “Predation has been isolated as the limiting factor preventing the herd from growing, and predator removal is increasing calf survival—we know that now—and we have seen increased calf survival as a result of our past IM efforts.”
The Mulchatna caribou herd crashed in recent decades, and there is heated debate about the cause.
The herd peaked at about 200,000 animals in 1997, when it provided up to 4,770 caribou for subsistence hunting in the region’s communities, according to the Department of Fish and Game. But the population crashed after then and is now estimated at about 16,000 animals, according to the department. Hunting has been closed in recent years.
State wildlife officials argue that predation by bears and wolves on caribou calves is the reason for the decline. The department has stated a goal of boosting the herd to a size ranging from 30,000 to 80,000 animals, enough to support resumption of hunting.
Backers of the Mulchatna predator control program have included the Alaska Federation of Natives, which passed a resolution in 2023 that supported the program because the organization says it is necessary to ensure food security in that part of the state.
But critics of the program, including some veteran Alaska wildlife biologists, argue that other factors caused the herd’s population crash. Among the cited factors is a change in habitat, driven by long-term warming, that makes the region less supportive of lichen-eating caribou and more favorable to moose and other animals dependent on woody plants. Migratory tundra caribou herds around the Arctic have suffered similar problems, with overall population declines of 65% in the past two to three decades, according to the 2024 Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Board of Game and Department of Fish and Game have lost past court fights over Mulchatna predator control.
Aside from having judges rule that the earlier program was unconstitutional, one of the judges found in May that the department acted in bad faith by continuing to conduct aerial shooting this spring even after the program was declared legally void.