At the direction of top Interior Department officials, prohibitions against baiting bears with things like grease-drenched bread and donuts will be reviewed by National Park Service personnel in Alaska. Last week the Park Service published in the Federal Register its intent to re-examine the regulations pertaining to sport hunting and trapping in national preserves in Alaska. 

It was back in 2015 that the Obama administration put the regulations into place, saying the state-authorized practices being prohibited conflict with Park Service law and policy.

This past July the Interior Department directed that the regulations be revisited. The order was signed by Virginia Johnson, Interior's principal deputy assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks.

"I have concluded that it would be prudent to reassess the need for the rule and give further consideration to certain elements," wrote Ms. Johnson on July 14 in a memo to Mike Reynolds, the Park Service's acting director. "I anticipate that you will focus this recommendation on certain aspets of the rule that I believe are particularly worthy of additional review.

"Most notably, these include the various prohibitions that directly contradict State of Alaska authorizations and wildlife management decisions, thereby potentially reducing opportunities for sport hunting and commercial trapping on National Park Service lands."

At the time, Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska professor and board member for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, noted the inherent conflicts between the state of Alaska's approach to wildlife and what the Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service are mandated to do.

“Alaska's national parks and wildlife refuges are required by federal law to be managed not as private game reserves but to protect natural diversity, including natural predator-prey dynamics,” he said. “The State of Alaska’s unethical predator control practices have no place in modern society, and certainly not on Alaska’s magnificent national parks and refuges."

Park Service officials in Alaska told the Traveler it could take a year or more to go through the National Environmental Policy Act process to review the changes Interior wants considered.

Desires by Alaska wildlife officials to reduce the number of predators while boosting elk and caribou populations for hunters have led to the wiping out of wolf packs that roamed Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.

Units of the National Park System are managed for naturally-functioning ecosystems and processes. While sport hunting is allowed in national preserves in Alaska, NPS policies prohibit manipulating native predator populations, typically bears and wolves, to increase numbers of harvested species, such as caribou and moose.