by Rick Sinnott
Four years ago the Alaska Legislature offered Gov. Sarah Palin and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game a special deal: $400,000 to “educate” voters on predator control. The money -- spent mostly on a video, glossy brochures and public presentations -- was meant to persuade and reassure Alaskans that predator control is essential and effective.
Firmly convinced he’s doing the right thing, the new director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation at Fish and Game, Corey Rossi, is taking predator control to new levels. For the first time since statehood, Alaska has targeted grizzly bears for large-scale population reductions, not by hunters but by agents of the state.
The publicity campaign, Rossi, Governor Sean Parnell and the Alaska Legislature would like you to believe that scientific experts on predator and prey populations -- particularly the professional wildlife biologists and researchers with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game -- unanimously support killing bears to increase numbers of moose and caribou.
But some of those experts have questioned the efficacy and advisability of reducing numbers of grizzly bears in a peer-reviewed article in the latest edition of the Journal of Wildlife Management.
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Wolves have long been hunted, trapped, poisoned, and shot from aircraft to increase prey populations. Because public hunting and trapping in Alaska are unable to reduce wolf populations and keep them low, in the past decade the state has increasingly relied on predator control agents. Now Alaska’s bears are being tossed into the predator-control arena.
This is not a new phenomenon either. What is new is that Alaska is bucking a 50-year hiatus on state-sponsored bear control. Before statehood, many Alaskans regarded grizzly bears as dangerous vermin. The celebrated brown bears of Kodiak Island were nominated for eradication because they ate salmon and cattle. This was during the Dark Ages of fish and game management, when bounties were paid not just for wolves, but harbor seals, bald eagles, and Dolly Varden char.
Following statehood, Alaska’s new wildlife managers attempted to raise the status of wolves, bears, eagles and other predators from varmints to valued species. However, moose and caribou hunters have always outnumbered wolf and bear hunters, and hunter tolerance of wolves and bears dipped after moose and caribou populations declined beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wildlife managers attribute those declines to a combination of severe winters, predation, and high hunter harvests. You can’t do much about the weather -- and moose and caribou were still in high demand as meat and trophies -- so many hunters and some wildlife managers returned to the earlier paradigm, demanding fewer wild predators.
Predator control was facilitated and accelerated in 1994 when the Alaska Legislature enacted the intensive management law. In my opinion, this law ignores a much broader public interest in wildlife resources. The state’s constitution mandates making all wildlife, not only moose and caribou, “available for maximum use consistent with the public interest” and conserving wildlife according to “the sustained yield principle, subject to preferences among beneficial uses.” This suggests that the state’s constitutional convention recognized the value of all Alaska’s wildlife and anticipated it would be managed holistically for all Alaskans. I've yet to find anything in the constitution about Alaska becoming the world’s largest game ranch. Nevertheless, the intensive management law required the Alaska Board of Game to elevate human consumption of wild animals over other beneficial uses, such as conserving natural diversity, tourism, or the satisfaction of knowing some corner of the world is not completely dominated by humans.
Before the legislature’s intervention, managing Alaska’s wildlife was like fixing grandpa’s gold watch. It entailed routine fine-tuning and replacement of springs, sprockets and cogs, the regulatory moving parts required to precisely apportion the resources of a complex world. The intensive management law removed essentially all the tools from the toolbox except one. The legislature expects Fish and Game to fix the watch with a hammer.
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The authors are well aware that both black and grizzly bears can be effective predators on moose calves, but it remains unclear whether reducing grizzly bear populations will increase calf survival. A calf eaten by a grizzly may have been just as likely to be killed by another predator, or disease, or accident, or an inexperienced mother. The point is that controversial and potentially destructive programs to control predators should be fiscally and scientifically justifiable. Fish and Game has spent millions of dollars -- in the field, in meetings, in public relations, and in the courtroom -- to implement and defend predator control. Are we harvesting millions of dollars worth of additional moose and caribou?
Predator control is seldom warranted ecologically, and is more usually politically driven. The authors were unable to find any place in Alaska in the past three decades where regulations were tightened when moose or caribou populations rebounded. Too many moose or caribou can damage critical winter ranges, throwing their populations into a tailspin. But some people fail to understand that you can have too much of a good thing. Because some hunters keep demanding more moose, more caribou, predator control doesn’t appear to have a political exit strategy. “Success” is a moving target because some hunters are never satisfied with the current availability of moose or caribou.
Read more:
Four years ago the Alaska Legislature offered Gov. Sarah Palin and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game a special deal: $400,000 to “educate” voters on predator control. The money -- spent mostly on a video, glossy brochures and public presentations -- was meant to persuade and reassure Alaskans that predator control is essential and effective.
Firmly convinced he’s doing the right thing, the new director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation at Fish and Game, Corey Rossi, is taking predator control to new levels. For the first time since statehood, Alaska has targeted grizzly bears for large-scale population reductions, not by hunters but by agents of the state.The publicity campaign, Rossi, Governor Sean Parnell and the Alaska Legislature would like you to believe that scientific experts on predator and prey populations -- particularly the professional wildlife biologists and researchers with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game -- unanimously support killing bears to increase numbers of moose and caribou.
But some of those experts have questioned the efficacy and advisability of reducing numbers of grizzly bears in a peer-reviewed article in the latest edition of the Journal of Wildlife Management.
------
Wolves have long been hunted, trapped, poisoned, and shot from aircraft to increase prey populations. Because public hunting and trapping in Alaska are unable to reduce wolf populations and keep them low, in the past decade the state has increasingly relied on predator control agents. Now Alaska’s bears are being tossed into the predator-control arena.
This is not a new phenomenon either. What is new is that Alaska is bucking a 50-year hiatus on state-sponsored bear control. Before statehood, many Alaskans regarded grizzly bears as dangerous vermin. The celebrated brown bears of Kodiak Island were nominated for eradication because they ate salmon and cattle. This was during the Dark Ages of fish and game management, when bounties were paid not just for wolves, but harbor seals, bald eagles, and Dolly Varden char.
Following statehood, Alaska’s new wildlife managers attempted to raise the status of wolves, bears, eagles and other predators from varmints to valued species. However, moose and caribou hunters have always outnumbered wolf and bear hunters, and hunter tolerance of wolves and bears dipped after moose and caribou populations declined beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wildlife managers attribute those declines to a combination of severe winters, predation, and high hunter harvests. You can’t do much about the weather -- and moose and caribou were still in high demand as meat and trophies -- so many hunters and some wildlife managers returned to the earlier paradigm, demanding fewer wild predators.
Predator control was facilitated and accelerated in 1994 when the Alaska Legislature enacted the intensive management law. In my opinion, this law ignores a much broader public interest in wildlife resources. The state’s constitution mandates making all wildlife, not only moose and caribou, “available for maximum use consistent with the public interest” and conserving wildlife according to “the sustained yield principle, subject to preferences among beneficial uses.” This suggests that the state’s constitutional convention recognized the value of all Alaska’s wildlife and anticipated it would be managed holistically for all Alaskans. I've yet to find anything in the constitution about Alaska becoming the world’s largest game ranch. Nevertheless, the intensive management law required the Alaska Board of Game to elevate human consumption of wild animals over other beneficial uses, such as conserving natural diversity, tourism, or the satisfaction of knowing some corner of the world is not completely dominated by humans.
Before the legislature’s intervention, managing Alaska’s wildlife was like fixing grandpa’s gold watch. It entailed routine fine-tuning and replacement of springs, sprockets and cogs, the regulatory moving parts required to precisely apportion the resources of a complex world. The intensive management law removed essentially all the tools from the toolbox except one. The legislature expects Fish and Game to fix the watch with a hammer.
------
The authors are well aware that both black and grizzly bears can be effective predators on moose calves, but it remains unclear whether reducing grizzly bear populations will increase calf survival. A calf eaten by a grizzly may have been just as likely to be killed by another predator, or disease, or accident, or an inexperienced mother. The point is that controversial and potentially destructive programs to control predators should be fiscally and scientifically justifiable. Fish and Game has spent millions of dollars -- in the field, in meetings, in public relations, and in the courtroom -- to implement and defend predator control. Are we harvesting millions of dollars worth of additional moose and caribou?
Predator control is seldom warranted ecologically, and is more usually politically driven. The authors were unable to find any place in Alaska in the past three decades where regulations were tightened when moose or caribou populations rebounded. Too many moose or caribou can damage critical winter ranges, throwing their populations into a tailspin. But some people fail to understand that you can have too much of a good thing. Because some hunters keep demanding more moose, more caribou, predator control doesn’t appear to have a political exit strategy. “Success” is a moving target because some hunters are never satisfied with the current availability of moose or caribou.
Read more:
