Ten months after ordered to do so, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has returned "threatened" status to grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem/NPS
Paperwork sometimes can take awhile. To that point, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just this week completed work to relist grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, a listing a federal judge called for last September.
In August 2017, the Fish and Wildlife Service removed the Yellowstone-region grizzly bear population from the federal endangered and threatened species list, even though the area’s grizzly population had suffered high levels of human-caused deaths in recent years. That decision prompted lawsuits; in all, six lawsuits challenging the decision were filed in federal courts in Missoula, Montana, and Chicago, Illinois.
The Chicago lawsuit was transferred to Missoula, and the lawsuits were consolidated as Crow Indian Tribe, et al. v. United States, et al., case no. CV 17-89-M-DLC.
The plaintiffs’ allegations focused primarily on violations of the ESA and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Last September, U.S. District Judge Dana L. Christensen agreed that the federal agency had failed to thoroughly review the bears' status and how delisting would affect other grizzly populations in the lower 48 states. Furthermore, he said Fish and Wildlife had acted arbitrarily and capriciously by refusing to commit that any future approach to estimating grizzly numbers in the ecosystem is "calibrated" to the approach to justify delisting.
This past Tuesday the Fish and Wildlife Service officially relisted Yellowstone area grizzlies as threatened.
U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said the judge's ruling was unwarranted.
"The court-ordered relisting of the grizzly was not based on science or facts, but was rather the result of excessive litigation pursued by radical environmentalists intent on destroying our Western way of life,” she said in a statement. "The thriving grizzly population within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem should be celebrated as a conservation success, with Wyoming investing significant resources in grizzly bear recovery and management since 2003.”
Cheney said she would work in Congress to legislate the species' removal from the Endangered Species List.
Grizzly bears in the United States and outside of Alaska are primarily found in six ecosystems: the Greater Yellowstone, the Northern Cascades, the Bitterroot, the Northern Continental Divide, and the Cabinet-Yaak. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, upon reviewing the best available scientific and commercial data, concluded that grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem had experienced robust population growth; state and federal agencies were cooperating to manage bear mortality and habitat; and appropriate regulatory mechanisms were put in place to ensure recovery.
Comments
I guess in the eyes of Liz Cheney, Frank and John Craighead were radical environmentalists. She is 100 years out of step with our envronment and ignorant of science. The biggest threat to the western way of life are people like her (and the current brigands in Washington). I stongly advocate for a total ban of trophy hunting not only in the Yellowstone ecosystem, but world wide. How much longer before these bare-chested, Putinesque, testosterone poisoned "hunters" kill off the very last of these magnificent animals?
Doug Lean, my dad always told me when I didn't know what I was talking about to keep my mouth shut. You should think about that. The only reason we have animals to enjoy and yes eat is because of the conservation minded hunters and there support of the wildlife. Try listening once in a while you might learn something.
Frank Bolyard, your retort to Doug Leen couldn't have been ruder, cruder, or more wrong. The days of hunting being a force for conservation, at least in the case of Yellowstone's grizzlies, are long gone. Let's try looking at the facts. Grizzly bears once ranged across the entire lower 48 states, numbering in the many tens of thousands, perhaps easily more than a hundred thousand. By the 1970s, there were fewer than two hundred left in the Greater Yellowstone Area, and, by the 1990s when federal protections had to be reinstated, less than a hundred remained. Again using a standard notional conservation genetics analysis, that represents an evolutionarily recent reduction in their gene pool of up to a thousand to one. Current estimates are that a thousand to fifteen hundred exist today; however, today's grizzlies are the recent descendants of a gene pool of certainly little more than a hundred. This horrific situation mirrors the current condition of almost all of the species that conservation minded hunters allegedly saved in the past. The numbers may vary between species; but, the severity of the modern conservation challenges are often comparable.
Let's go back to an analogy I've used before. Imagine that the roughly three hundred million Americans in our national gene pool today suffered a thousand to one gene pool reduction like the one suffered by these grizzlies and only three hundred thousand Americans survived to reconstitute our population. Out of all of our vibrant and thriving cities, only one tenth of one percent of our population survived. As I have asked before, would they be our best or would they be among our worst? Again, after such a calamity, our future would be much more likely to be dystopian than utopian. Now, go back and consider all the traits, capabilities, and survival skills grizzlies may have lost. Remember also that the state of the science on predicting if, when, and where inbreeding effects are going to appear and be recognized is nowhere near mature or reliable.
My point is that, given the risk that stochastic events will impact this depleted gene pool further and given the poorly defined risks of inbreeding damage, there is no mature or ethical reason to hunt this species just for sport. As I have said before, at this point, we need these grizzlies happily breeding and replicating the leftover remnants of their once so much more complex gene pool far more than we need spoiled hunters who are so childishly unethical as to want to continue killing them just to have something to do. I do not disagree with a threatened or even endangered listing for this species either.
Hunters will never be the end of bears in yellowstone.....they all will die from from the hand of tourist that get too close for a picture or leave food out and get the bears in trouble....if you want to save a specie.....you should hunt it....hunters fund alot of wildlife programs and provide habitat for all the species we Love and Hunt.
Your mother must have been frightened by a copy of Orwell's 1984; you're full of doublespeak ...along with something else. To kill wildlife is to save wildlife? Hunters absolutely do not fund even their fair share of wildlife programs; most of them are far too selfishly cheap for that; they spend their time complaining about having to pay even their fair share of general taxes, much less anything more for conservation programs. Hunters absolutely do not go out of their way to provide habitat; most of them even complain about the extent of and protections on public lands that do provide habitat. Most hunters are selfish, narcissistic, exhibitionistic children. There are only two things they love; they love to kill and they love themselves.
Uh yeah hunters do fund habitat acquisition through many outlets, including licensing, permits, and stamps. You're stuck on D.C. speak for "fair share of general taxes". That's not what Rick and Frank are talking about. And your "most hunters are selfish, narcissistic..." is a generalisation. A emotional rant in place of an argument.
As for Grizzly hunts, it's not for me. I'm not interested in hunting something I can't eat. Elk, Deer, sure. Bear? Forget it.
Pittman-Robertson Act of 1938
Rump - are you suggesting most hunters hunt naked?