With the Alaska Department of Fish and Game poised to start culling bears in a program to boost the population of a depleted caribou herd, critics have asked a state judge to block the program before the shooting begins.
The Alaska Wildlife Alliance is seeking an injunction to prevent the department from resuming a controversial predator control program in 40,000 square miles of state land east of the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge and west of Katmai National Park and Preserve. The territory is used by the Mulchatna Caribou Herd.
The alliance maintains that the predator control program the department seeks to pursue is no better than the program found unconstitutional last year by two state Superior Court judges, Andrew Guidi and Christina Rankin.
The Department of Fish and Game, however, argues that the constitutional violations the judges identified have been addressed and that the program is too important to Western Alaska subsistence hunters to delay. The department says it must remove bears from the area to give the Mulchatna herd a better chance to recover — and that the removal needs to happen soon, this spring, when the caribou are giving birth to calves that might be vulnerable to bear predation.
The parties were in court on Friday arguing their cases before a third Superior Court judge considering the matter, Adolf Zeman.
“The board has reinstated the exact same predator control program that was struck down by the court as unconstitutional for failure to consider bear population data,” Michelle Sinnott, the attorney representing the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, told Zeman at the hearing.
The only new information that the department has provided concerns caribou, information that is irrelevant to the question of whether bears are adequately protected, Sinnott said.
Kimberly Del Frate, the state attorney arguing on behalf of Fish and Game, told Zeman the bear-culling program, as designed by the department, will not harm the overall bear population.
“The bear removal itself is narrow and targeted,” and therefore does not threaten the sustained yield of the bear population, she said.
Further, an emphasis on Mulchatna herd health over bear numbers is justified, Del Frate argued. Past state Supreme Court rulings and state legislation shows that the concept of “sustained yield,” which is in the Alaska constitution and expresses the principle of managing natural resources for long-term health, is meant to be flexible, she said.
“It expressly allows for preferences among beneficial uses, such as a preference for prey species as a food source over other uses of predator species,” she said.
Zeman, at the conclusion of Friday’s hearing, promised a speedy decision.
“I understand that we’re time-sensitive here, so I will issue a decision here as soon as I can,” he said.
The bear-culling is planned for this month, when the caribou begin giving birth to their calves, said Patty Sullivan, a spokesperson for the Department of Fish and Game. There is not a firm start date, she said.
“Typically, we would start looking for signs of calving in the Mulchatna (area) during the first couple weeks of May. Exact timing varies from year to year depending on how and where calving is occurring. It’s fairly dynamic,” she said by email.
Critics of the program say it threatens populations of bears that use habitat in Katmai National Park and Preserve, among other sites.
The program was initially authorized by the Alaska Board of Game in 2022, and it started in 2023. From 2023 to 2025, the program killed 186 brown bears, five black bears and 20 wolves. Of that total, 11 brown bears were killed last spring, days after Rankin’s May 7, 2025, ruling that found the program legally void. The judge responded by issuing a restraining order against the department.
Both Guidi and Rankin had found that the Mulhatna predator control program, as approved by the Board of Game and carried out by the Department of Fish and Game, violated the constitution’s sustained yield provision by failing to assess population impacts on bears, as well as provisions requiring adequate public notice and participation.
The Board last July approved a revived Mulchatna predator control program; board members said it addressed issues raised by the earlier court rulings.
The Mulchatna herd population peaked at about 200,000 animals in the 1990s but is now down to about 15,000 animals, according to the Department of Fish and Game. Hunting was closed in 2021. The department’s goal is to bring the numbers up to between 30,000 and 80,000 animals, a population size that would support resumed hunting.
The department argues that predator control done to date has already helped the herd. But critics argue that the herd’s population has now stabilized and that factors other than bear predation — including habitat change, disease and past overhunting — are more likely causes of the population decline.