Yellowstone grizzly bear
A federal judge returned Yellowstone-area grizzly bears to Endangered Species Act protection and permanently blocked grizzly hunting seasons in Wyoming and Idaho on Monday.
“Although this order may have impacts throughout grizzly country and beyond, this case is not about the ethics of hunting and it is not about solving human- or livestock-grizzly conflicts as a practical or philosophical matter,” U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen wrote at the start of his 48-page ruling. “This court’s review, constrained by the Constitution and the laws enacted by Congress, is limited to answering a yes-or-no question: Did the United States Fish and Wildlife Service exceed its legal authority when it delisted the Greater Yellowstone grizzly bear?”
Christensen ruled the agency did err by failing to consider how delisting the estimated 750 grizzlies in and around Yellowstone National Park might affect survival of another roughly 1,200 bears in five other recovery areas. He wrote Fish and Wildlife Service also acted arbitrarily and capriciously in analyzing threats to the Yellowstone bears.
Wildlife agencies in Wyoming and Idaho planned to let hunters with special permits kill up to 23 grizzlies in the first big-game seasons for the bears in three decades. On Aug. 30, Christensen temporarily suspended the states’ Sept. 1 season just hours after he recessed a four-hour hearing on the federal government’s case for turning the bears over to state management.
A coalition of more than 20 conservation groups, Indian tribes and environmentalists challenged the 2017 delisting. While they raised a wide range of arguments about the Fish and Wildlife Service’s failure to consult with Indian sovereign governments, and inadequate scientific proof of grizzly recovery in the three-state area around Yellowstone, Christensen said he limited his review to whether the agency met its requirements under the Endangered Species Act and Administrative Procedures Act.
“(T)he service entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem,” Christensen wrote. FWS also “illegally negotiated away its obligation to apply the best available science in order to reach an accommodation with the states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.” And it relied on two studies supporting the Yellowstone bears’ genetic independence when both studies concluded the bears actually needed more genetic interchange from other populations.
“Imagine an isolated town of 700 people that does not mix with the outside world,” Alliance for the Wild Rockies Director Michael Garrity wrote in an email on Monday. “After a few generations every [one] would be cousins. They would all be inbred. The same thing is happening to Yellowstone grizzlies. They can’t be recovered until their population is reconnected to the grizzly bear population around Glacier Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness area.”
