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Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Alaska to resume bear-killing program, despite court order finding it to be void
A bear hunts for salmon in Katmai National Park. (National Park Service photo) The Alaska Department of Fish and Game said Friday it will resume its predator control this weekend in Western Alaska, despite a court ruling two days earlier that determined the program remains in violation of the state constitution. The program, which is using aircraft to kill bears in the area used by the ailing Mulchatna Caribou Herd, will resume on Saturday, the department said in a statement. In its statement, the Department of Fish and Game said Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin's decision against issuing a restraining order that was sought by an environmental organization, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, allows predator control to be carried out, as authorized by the Board of Game in March. 'The court order did not prohibit these activities or invalidate emergency regulations adopted by the Alaska Board of Game on March 27, 2025,' the statement said. The program is needed to improve calf survival so that the herd size can grow enough to support hunting, the department's statement said. 'During the peak, this herd provided as many as 4,770 caribou for the subsistence needs of more than 48 local communities, as well as hunting opportunities for all Alaskans and nonresidents,' the statement said. While Rankin declined to issue a restraining order sought by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, she ruled that the need for such an order was moot. Her ruling, issued Wednesday, said the state remained bound by an earlier decision, issued on March 14 by Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi, which found that the program was unconstitutional. The Board of Game's action two weeks later failed to address the deficiencies that Guidi identified, she said. The Mulchatna predator control program was initially authorized in 2022. It started in 2023. Through it, 180 bears and 19 wolves have been killed, according to the department. The program has been carried out during spring and early summer, the time of year when the caribou are giving birth to their calves that department officials say are vulnerable to being killed by bears. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance on Friday before the state announcement already had filed a new application for a restraining order to prevent the startup of this year's predator control, along with additional information providing evidence that the state was gearing up to kill bears. Joe Geldhof, an attorney for the alliance, accused the state of violating the judge's order. 'This is so wrong on so many levels. And it's now turning into a constitutional fight,' he said late Friday, after the department announced that its predator control will resume. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge rejects bid to halt state's Southwest Alaska bear-killing program, finding it still invalid
May 9—An Anchorage Superior Court judge in an order issued Wednesday denied a request to strike down a controversial state-sponsored predator control program that has so far killed 180 bears in Southwest Alaska. But in the same ruling, Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin criticized the Alaska Department of Fish and Game effort as circumventing a prior court ruling that found the program was unlawful. She stopped short of demanding the department halt the program, leaving open the possibility the state could resume shooting bears from a helicopter in the third year of a policy that state wildlife officials say they established to help rebuild the Mulchatna caribou herd. "The Alaska Supreme Court has noted that injunctions and restraining orders are not an appropriate means for the judiciary to manage fish and game resources," Rankin wrote in Wednesday's decision. It wasn't immediately clear whether the state will decide to begin killing bears this month as originally planned. The decision this week came in response to a request for an injunction filed in April by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, an environmental advocacy group. The group sought a halt to the predator control season expected to resume this spring. The request came after the Alaska Board of Game passed an emergency order in late March to keep the bear program on track weeks after a different judge ruled that it was unconstitutional. In a written statement Thursday, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance did not address the judge's denial of the injunction request, but said Rankin's ruling upheld earlier findings that the program is unlawful and should not be executed. If the state does move forward with the Mulchatna program this year, it's the Alliance's understanding that "they would be doing so in contempt of court," the group said. The state's emergency order still doesn't meet the standards set by the original judge's order in March, according to the group. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance said its next legal steps will depend on how the state proceeds. A spokesperson for Fish and Game said Thursday that the department was still assessing Rankin's decision and did not yet have a comment. Rankin's ruling was narrowly focused on procedural elements involved in the state's Mulchatna predator control program, rather than the merits of the program itself. The state's Mulchatna predator control program changed in 2023, when Fish and Game undertook a new initiative aiming to kill all bears on the herd's calving grounds in order to reduce predation on newborn caribou. For years, the Board of Game had authorized predator control on wolves in the area. But in 2022, the board approved the expansion of an existing predator control program to also target bears. The Mulchatna herd numbered above 200,000 animals in 1997, a size some biologists say was beyond what the environment could support, and contributed to its collapse. State managers now estimate there are around 15,000 caribou in the herd, well below the objective of 30,000-80,000 they believe are needed to responsibly resume subsistence hunting. State wildlife officials have acknowledged the broader factors at play like disease and a changing habitat, but say killing predators has been shown to increase calf numbers — and is one factor they can control. In 2023, the state Division of Wildlife Conservation reported killing 99 bears — 94 brown, five black — during a roughly one-month period in an area between Dillingham and Bethel where the Mulchatna herd calves. The next year, state employees working from spotter planes and a helicopter shot another 84 brown bears. State officials estimate the combined cost of both years of the predator control program in the area at nearly $817,000. The court case began in 2023, when the Alaska Wildlife Alliance filed a lawsuit claiming the state and Board of Game had not given the public enough notice about the proposed expansion of predator control operations from just wolves to all bears in the calving area, which encompassed 530 square miles last season. The lawsuit also argued the policy violates constitutional protections for natural resources, in part because the state doesn't actually have good data on the number of bears in the region. This March, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi sided with the Wildlife Alliance, writing that the state had not followed its own protocols, and deemed the program unconstitutional. Guidi's order, however, was based on a finding that the process for approving and implementing the program was flawed, not that predator control itself, or culling bears to protect caribou stocks, was necessarily invalid. Given the potential for the order to end the state's ability to include bears in the Mulchatna predator control program, Fish and Game quickly brought an emergency petition to the full Board of Game to continue the program. Rankin took over the case this month after Guidi retired May 1. The Board of Game emergency order, the Wildlife Alliance's lawyers argued this week, is more or less identical with the program Guidi found flawed, and does not negate the judge's earlier finding. "The emergency petition felt like it was a way to work around what the court had ordered," the group's executive director, Nicole Schmitt, said during testimony Tuesday. The state disputed that characterization, arguing repeatedly that the Board of Game determined the Mulchatna caribou herd's low population numbers constituted a crisis. "The emergency is a biological one," said Kimberly Del Frate, an assistant district attorney from the state Department of Law. Rankin appeared unmoved by that reasoning and grilled the state's attorney about it repeatedly during Wednesday's five-hour hearing. "The emergency wasn't the biological one, it was the court order ... not anything that happened with the herd," Rankin cut in at one point. Rankin said during Tuesday's hearing that she was "threading the needle" on what she had the authority to decide. She said she explicitly aimed to keep the hearing narrow, admonishing lawyers from both sides when they got too far into "the weeds" on either the science or procedural history of the case. "I can't invalidate the current order," Rankin said Tuesday. "This court cannot say, 'You can't kill bears.'" Rankin in her order said the state had failed to comply with the earlier Superior Court ruling, citing in particular the board's March emergency order, which she said was also done without adequate public notice. She wrote that the state's argument to the contrary was "disingenuous." In defending the program, wildlife managers from Fish and Game have pointed to their statutory responsibility under state law to implement management policies that "restore the abundance or productivity of identified big game prey populations as necessary to achieve human consumptive use goals." "I didn't think I could ignore the statutes," Division of Wildlife Conservation director Ryan Scott testified Tuesday about the decision to pursue an emergency order after the court's earlier ruling. "If there was a way to move forward with this year to conduct the operations, I felt like we should do that." In an interview after Tuesday's hearing, Scott said Fish and Game did not have personnel in the field yet for aerial gunning operations because officials were waiting on the judge's decision. But there are a lot of logistics involved in the predator removal program, including caching aviation fuel in the areas where spotter planes and helicopters fly. Those plans have remained in motion through the latest court hearings, Scott said.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge says Alaska bear-killing program remains void, despite emergency authorization
A brown bear walks on the tundra in Katmai National Park and Preserve on Aug. 11, 2023. Critics of the state's bear-culling program, which is aimed at boosting Mulchatna Caribou Herd numbers, say Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials have failed to adequately analyze impacts to bear populations, including impacts to bears that roam in Katmai. (Photo by F. Jimenez/National Park Service) The Alaska Department of Fish and Game does not have the right to carry out a controversial plan to kill bears this spring, at least for now, a state judge has ruled. Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin found that the department's predator control program, aimed at boosting a caribou population that has declined dramatically since the 1990s, remains unconstitutional, despite an Alaska Board of Game emergency authorization for the bear-killing to resume. Through the program, which began in the spring of 2023 after the board first authorized it in 2022, the department has killed 175 brown bears, five black bears and 19 wolves. Rankin's order, released late Wednesday, was in response to a request by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance for a restraining order barring the department from carrying out this year's predator control. The department had planned to start culling bears this weekend. A restraining order is not needed because the program is already legally invalid, under a ruling issued by Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi on March 14, Rankin said. Neither the Department of Fish and Game's March 21 petition for an emergency nor the Board of Game's March 27 approval of the emergency changed the fact that there is an existing court ruling that the predator control program violates the constitution, Rankin said. The state has not satisfied the requirements in Guidi's order for adequate public notice and analysis of the predator control program's impact on the bear population, Rankin said. Because of that, 'the Court specifically finds that the requirements of the Order have not been met and are still binding on the State,' she said. Critics of the state's program argue that bears are not to blame for the Mulchatna Caribou Herd's decline. They point to numerous other factors, including a changing habitat in which tundra vegetation favorable to caribou has been replaced by woody plants favorable to moose. They also argue that the predator control program poses a threat to bear populations, including those that roam through Katmai National Park and Preserve. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance sued the state in 2023 to block the program, and that lawsuit resulted in Guidi's March ruling. On Thursday, the alliance counted Rankin's ruling as a victory, even though it did not result in a restraining order blocking the state's plans to start roving bears on Sunday. 'The Superior court ruled that the existing predator control program was unlawful, which means that the State poached almost 200 bears over the past few years, including dozens of cubs, from planes and helicopters,' Nicole Schmitt, the organization's executive director, said in a statement. 'Instead of remedying those legalities, the State and the Board tried to skirt the public process again. We're grateful the Court saw this process for what it was: an attempt to run-around a Court order without meaningful engagement from the public.' In their petition to the Board of Game for emergency authorization, state officials argued that they were under a time crunch to remove bears from the caribou herd's range. The bear culling has to be conducted during the spring and early summer, the time when caribou are giving birth to calves on which the bears might prey, department officials argued in their petition and at the March Board of Game meeting. But Rankin, in a hearing Tuesday, expressed skepticism about the justification for the emergency finding. She peppered Kimberly Del Frate, an assistant attorney general for the state, with questions about how the emergency action would not be seen as an end run around Guidi's ruling. 'I know it's a hard fact, but you need to just admit it: The emergency was created because you lost with Judge Guidi. You wouldn't have needed to do it if you didn't have this decision,' Rankin told Del Frate. Department of Fish and Game officials did not provide information Thursday on their plans now for predator control in the Mulchatna area. The department was still evaluating Rankin's decision, a spokesperson said. Joe Geldhof, one of the attorneys representing the organization, said he fears that state officials will carry out their predatory control program in defiance of the ruling. He and fellow attorney Joel Bennett, a former Board of Game member, see parallels with the Trump administration's defiance of court rulings. To try to bolster the case against the bear-killing program – and potentially give Rankin legal grounds to issue a restraining order against the Department of Fish and Game — Geldhof and Bennett on Wednesday filed an amended complaint that adds the Board of Game's emergency authorization to the list of state actions that they want to overturn. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Anchorage judge rules state's brown-bear killings are unconstitutional
Four brown bears line up at the top of the falls on the Brooks River on Sept. 6, 2021, to fish for salmon. Brooks Falls draws bears from around the region, as well as Katmai National Park and Preserve tourists who travel there to view the bear crowds. (Photo by L. Law/National Park Service) The Alaska Department of Fish and Game's decision to kill almost 200 brown bears in order to boost a struggling caribou herd violated due process and was unconstitutional, an Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled Friday. Judge Andrew Guidi's 10-page decision means at least a temporary end to the state's controversial bear-killing program, which was intended to aid the struggling Mulchatna caribou herd. 'Unless they want to seek a stay of this decision, they've got to stop killing bears,' said attorney Joe Geldhof, who represented the Alaska Wildlife Alliance in a lawsuit that prompted Friday's decision. The Alliance sued the state in 2023 to challenge the application of Alaska's 'intensive management' project in Southwest Alaska. Originally designed to kill wolves in order to boost the populations of prey species that hunters pursue, the program was expanded in 2022 to cover bears that have been preying on the Mulchatna caribou herd. That herd, which contained 200,000 animals at its peak in 1997, has declined to about 13,000 animals and is closed to hunting. Anchorage attorney Michelle Bittner filed a separate lawsuit, also challenging the state's bear-killing program. Both lawsuits argued that the state's Board of Game failed to follow adequate due process standards before beginning the program. Before a judge could consider the merits of either case, state attorneys argued that Bittner did not have the standing to bring a lawsuit on the issue. That argument went all the way to the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled in February that Bittner could bring her case. That cleared the way for the Alaska Wildlife Alliance's lawsuit to advance as well, with oral arguments taking place in March. Ruling Friday on the merits, Guidi concluded that the Board of Game violated due process and did not provide adequate public notice when it began its bear-killing program. 'The notice provided by the BOG contemplating extension of an existing wolf control program to lands managed by the federal government that was altered to include a bear removal program on state lands substantially changed the subject matter of the proposal,' Guidi wrote. 'These changes went far beyond varying, clarifying or altering the specific matter of the proposal addressed in the original notice. As a result, the BOG failed to adhere to mandatory due process standards.' Guidi also found that the Board of Game violated the Alaska Constitution's principle of sustained yield because it valued the sustainability of caribou herds but didn't adequately study what would happen to bear populations. 'The issue of the bear population and distribution is an obvious salient issue touching on sustainability,' he wrote. 'Addressing the sustainability of a constitutionally protected resource like bears almost certainly requires the BOG to engage in more than a rudimentary discussion about a bear population or engage in conclusionary opinions when considering a proposal to initiate a program calling for the unrestricted killing of bears.' A spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law, which represented the Board of Game in the lawsuit, said the state is reviewing the order and considering its options for how to proceed. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
