The attention focused on the spectacle of state wildlife biologists flying around in helicopters shooting every grizzly bear they can find (186 killed so far plus 5 black bears and 20 wolves) on the calving grounds of the Mulchatna Caribou Herd in Southwest Alaska should not obscure the geographically much larger campaign against grizzly bears being conducted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the Alaska Board of Game.

This war, often termed “intensive management,” is being conducted through decades of liberalized bear hunting regulations motivated by the desire to reduce bear numbers in the hope this will result in more moose and caribou for harvest by hunters (most of whom live in urban areas).

The Mulchatna program is officially defined as being “predator control” because it involves aerial shooting of bears by Fish and Game staff. The geographically much larger effort to reduce bear abundance using regulation liberalizations is not defined as predator control. This lawyerly sleight-of-hand by definition allows Fish and Game to misleadingly claim that predator control on bears (and wolves) is occurring only in the relatively small portions of Alaska where aerial shooting of bears is ongoing. The opposite is true using a commonsense definition of predator control, which is to achieve declines in predator numbers.

We are four retired Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists who have published one or more peer-reviewed papers documenting this effort to reduce grizzly abundance through regulation liberalizations. We documented this in an area that represents approximately 76% of Alaska; the area where liberalizations of bear hunting regulations are most aggressive. This is everywhere except in Southeast Alaska, Kodiak, Prince William Sound and the Alaska Peninsula, where bears are large and are still managed for sustainable trophy harvests. It includes all areas where moose and/or caribou are common. Some elements of the liberalizations in this area include:

• Liberalized regulations in a Game Management Subunit a total of 253 times and made more conservative only six times. This contrasts dramatically with the pattern prior to passage of the Intensive Management law in 1994, when regulation changes were equally balanced between small tweaks in either direction.

• Increasing the bag limit from one bear every 4 years (everywhere in 1980) to 1 or two bears per year. In 2005, 5% of the area had an annual bag limit of 2 per year but this increased to 45% by 2020 and to 67% by 2025.

• Longer open hunting seasons to include periods when hides are in poor condition and bears are in dens. The whole area had hunting seasons totaling less than 100 days in 1975; by 2015, 100% of the area had seasons longer than 300 days (20% longer than 350 days).

•Grizzly bears could not be baited anywhere in 2010 but, by 2022, grizzlies could be baited in 75% of the area (essentially everywhere except north of the Brooks Range).

• In 1975, all resident hunters were required to purchase a $25 tag prior to hunting grizzly bears but this is now routinely waived everywhere.

• Regulations designed to incentivize killing more grizzlies even include allowing hunters to sell the hides and skulls of bears they kill (nowhere prior to 2010, 26% of the area in 2016 and 67% in 2025). Allowing these sales is, effectively, a bounty on bears and is contrary to one of the basic principles of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation against the commercialization of hunted wildlife.

Throughout this entire area of our analysis, there has been only one scientific study with new information on grizzly bear numbers or trends. In Subunit 13A, Fish and Game biologists reported a decline in bear density of 25%-40% during 1998-2012; results from a follow-up ADFG study in the same area 5 years ago have not been analyzed. It is scientifically irresponsible to conduct a study like this with (in all likelihood) more than $200,000 of public funds expended and not analyze and report the results. Declines in grizzly bear density similar to or greater than those found in 13A have probably occurred throughout Alaska correlated with the regulation liberalizations (and documented increases in grizzly bear harvests). Nobody can say this for sure however, because the state has not done any studies. Short of avoiding extirpation, it is hard not to conclude that the BOG and the leadership of ADFG does not care what is happening to grizzly bear populations in most of Alaska.

This aggressive management of bears is largely driven by the 1994 Intensive Management Law (IM). This law set a wildlife management priority for human consumptive use of moose, caribou, and deer. Under the IM law, state managers are effectively required to conduct predator reduction efforts wherever hunter demands for more moose or caribou harvests exceed the supply.

Nowhere in Alaska since the passage of the IM law has there been any scientifically-documented “success” showing increased hunter harvests of moose, caribou or deer that is significantly correlated with the predator reduction programs. One of us (Sterling Miller) co-authored the only peer-reviewed paper on this topic since passage of the IM law; this paper concluded that 40 years of wolf and bear reduction efforts in GMU 13 were not correlated with increased hunter harvests of moose. We are saddened to see the agency in which we once proudly served the Alaska public now reduced to shooting bears (and wolves) from helicopters in some areas while misleading Alaskans about the true extent of the war on bears that is occurring in Alaska and its “effectiveness”.

Sterling Miller, PhD; John Schoen, PhD; Charles C. Schwarz, PhD; and Jim Faro, MS are retired research and management biologists for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Wildlife Conservation who have conducted research on bears and other topics in Alaska and elsewhere.

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