Yellowstone Grizzlies Regain Legal Protection

courtesy: National Park Service

In a big win for Yellowstone's grizzlies, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the great bears should remain in the Endangered Species Act's threatened category.  De-listing the bears, which would have exposed them to trophy hunting outside park boundaries, was proposed by the regime but blocked by a federal District Court.  In affirming the lower court, the circuit judges recognized that the Fish & Wildlife Service succumbed to political pressure while ignoring the scientific evidence that the Yellowstone population is too small and isolated to insure its long term survival while exposed to hunting in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

The Yellowstone population of grizzlies has not grown in the past twenty years, but it is expanding its range in response to the lack of food.  Whitebark pine trees and cutthroat trout populations are decimated.  The bears are moving out of their core habitat in the national park to find more suitable habitat in their historic range.  This apparent increase in the number of bears has prompted hunting interests to pressure the pro-exploitation regime in Washington to propose de-listing in 2017.  The federal district court found the proposed rule change arbitrary and capricious in 2018 after a plaintiff group of conservation organizations and native organizations sued to keep the bears protected.  They were opposed, predictably, by the National Rife Association and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. 

The science facts on the ground are that until the Rocky Mountain grizzly is restore to one connected, trans-border population its survival in the wild is threatened. About five thousand grizzlies live in the contiguous United States. Five isolated islands of population, like the one that lives in the Yellowstone, leads to inbreeding making the species susceptible to extinction by the forces of natural selection.