Environmental groups ask judge to pause Alaska’s bear cull program scheduled for this month

Two environmental groups are asking an Anchorage Superior Court judge to pause a program killing bears in the southwest part of the state before it gets underway later this month.

The plaintiffs in the case, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and Center for Biological Diversity, are seeking a preliminary injunction. Their attorney as well as a lawyer for the state of Alaska argued before Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman on Friday afternoon in Anchorage.

The state’s intensive management efforts are slated to resume this month for a fourth season. Since 2023, personnel with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game have used small airplanes and a helicopter to kill 191 bears in a remote part of Southwest Alaska between Dillingham and Bethel where the Mulchatna caribou herd calves each May.

Proponents of the program in the department and on the state Board of Game argue that predation from bears is a primary reason the Mulchatna herd has drastically declined over the last decade, and that they are required by state statute to implement policies that will increase the abundance of prey species for subsistence users and hunters.

At issue in Friday’s hearing is a dispute over whether policymakers used sufficient biological data to justify the program when it was authorized. The Mulchatna predator control policy was initially approved by the Board of Game in 2022, and in the years since, a series of legal challenges has played out in lawsuits and regulatory meetings.

The lawyer for the plaintiff, Michelle Sinnott, said the emergency request for an injunction is needed because there could be irreparable environmental harm if the state goes forward with aerial gunning this month.

“The state will start killing bears any day now under an unconstitutional predator control program,” Sinnott argued.

Much of the plantiffs’ argument that the program is illegal under Alaska laws hinges on the assertion that the Board of Game and state wildlife managers don’t have enough credible data on the region’s bear population to responsibly justify removing hundreds in a few years without causing ecological devastation. The injunction, they argued, is necessary because time is of the essence, and letting the constitutional challenge play out along the court’s normal timelines is insufficient.

“(The state) could kill a hundred more bears before being told once again that it needs bear population data,” Sinnott said. “Killing a bear permanently removes that bear from the landscape. That harm is irreparable.”

Kimberly Del Frate, the lawyer for the state, disputed that there was insufficient data weighed by the Board of Game when it reauthorized the bear cull program last summer.

“The plaintiff’s case is built upon a foundation of an incorrect and faulty premise. What became clear through the plaintiff’s argument is that their understanding of the record is that the Board considered nothing new and no data in July of 2025,” Del Frate said.

She pointed to several different metrics evaluated by policymakers in reapproving the predator control program after it was halted last spring by a separate lawsuit. Among the data managers presented to the board, Del Frate said, was an estimated 19% increase in the Mulchatna herd’s population. The state needs to continue with aggressive bear culling this spring, she argued, for that trend to continue and not be prematurely “stunted.”

Sinnott raised a point made by critics asserting that managers have relied on shoddy data collection methods far below the standards of sound wildlife biology in justifying the Southwest bear culling.

The rebuttal to that criticism from the state during Friday’s hearing is that it is not the court’s job to evaluate the relative merits of data used by officials setting policy.

If the court agrees to an injunction, state crews would be legally barred from killing bears this season. Should the state prevail, however, aerial gunning could begin in mid-May and last approximately three weeks with no limit on the number of bears killed.

Zeman concluded Friday’s hearing by clarifying that his ruling “won’t be today, but it will be soon.”