The Alaska Superior Court ruled in favor of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance in a lawsuit challenging the predator control of brown bears by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on certain state public lands.
The litigation, filed by AWA, stemmed from a 2023 predator control operation that authorized by the Alaska Board of Game in 2022. In May and June of 2023, ADF&G conducted a predator-control operation in the Mulchatna caribou calving grounds, resulting in the killing of 94 brown bears, 5 black bears, and 5 wolves.
AWA raised a constitutional claim that the Board of Game failed to provide procedural due process under Article I, Section 7 of the Alaska Constitution. The group also claimed that the Board of Game’s decision violated Article VI, Section 4, which mandates that replenishable state resources be managed under the “sustained yield principle.”
“The notice provided by the BOG contemplating extension of an existing wolf control program to lands managed by the federal government that was altered to include a bear removal program on state lands substantially
changed the subject mater of the proposal. These changes went far beyond varying, clarifying or altering the specific matter of the proposal addressed in the original notice. As a result, the BOG failed to adhere to mandatory due process standards,” Judge Andrew Guidi wrote in his decision.
The State of Alaska and others denied any constitutional violations and said the Alaska Wildlife Alliance lacked standing to bring the case. However, the court granted AWA standing to challenge the state’s actions.
ADF&G, represented by the Department of Law, has not yet announced whether it plans to appeal the decision.
I don’t know what the intent of the suit was, but if a black bear, brown bear, polar bear, or environmentalist threatens my family, I will take whatever steps are necessary to protect them at the moment. Just sayin’.
Just sayin’ I’m pretty sure the intent of the lawsuit was to require the bureaucrats to adhere to the Alaska Constitution.
That’s what the judge found.
Got a problem with that?
Joe I have a problem with people who don’t understand wildlife management and the use of harvest as a tool for managing populations of animals vs managing for the health of individual animals. If you really want to save the earth like the super hero you think you are, keep driving your Subaru at about ten under the speed limit. People will love you for it. Promise!
I’ll bet you are normally not that gullible all the time you just always believe what you want to believe.
Again shows readers that inside the USA, democratic means are essentially devaluing democracy: things don’t get done. Remember the axiom: “committees take minutes, waste hours?” Everyone is allowed to debate. Debating without conflict resolution time goals leads to delays: denial of achieving productivity. Agreed policies of trade require discipline. Conflicts arise out of non-compliance to pacts. Debates have their limits. Remember the adage: “justice delayed, is justice denied”? Autocracy works as it accelerates enacting of goals, productivity. The Occident continues to lose ground with the arise of dictatorship. NIMBYISM is an expedient method of accelerating decisions in the West. Reason? Autocracy is fast. Hence MANY decisions work quickly inside autocratic systems. Growth and economics still mandate return on investment. The same holds true of prey-predator relationships within environmental resource management. Through leaving decisions to the judiciary, or worse, to judges, alleged statuatory or policy transgressions are simply too frequent leading to even another greater delay and costly decision-making-outcome. No?
Not a fan of an entire branch of government, huh? Our court system is designed to use argument and reasoning, so to say there’s no debate is just plain wrong.
Yeah, because there are never any activist judges sitting on the bench….
Fred: What kind of dressing are you serving with this word salad?
This is why we should feed lawyers and judges to Brown Bears and save caribou and moose calves..
One group has a valve to humans as a food source and the other group is simply a parasitic tapeworm.
I wonder what our new state doge has to say about the costs/ benefits of this predator removal program?
This was in 2023. You wouldn’t even see the benefits for at least 3-4 years.
are you thinking the removal of predators should be left up to the public, like it used to be
What happened to the 2010 AK Supreme Court decision on predator control West vs. State Board of Game that upheld predator management as constitutionally valid? I wonder how the current AK Supremes will find in this case.
What happened to the 2010 AK Supreme Court decision on predator control West vs. State Board of Game that upheld predator management as constitutionally valid? I wonder how the current AK Supremes will find in this case.
What happened to the 2010 AK Supreme Court decision on predator control West vs. State Board of Game that upheld predator management as constitutionally valid? I wonder how the current AK Supremes will find in this case.
It’s ALL good ?
There is an easy solution to this. Allow same day fly in hunting and remove regulatory limits on all target predator species in the GMU by emergency order. Once the ADF&G biologists meet their desired quota then they can close the GMU by emergency order.
Ha Ha! John, ever hear of APHA? The guides association WILL NEVER relinquish their stranglehold over hunts requiring guides. They say its a public safety issue. It’s a laughable stupid, illogical argument, but its what they throw at you and the BOG. A nonresident guy with 40 years of bowhunting experience all over the world can’t kill a brown bear/grizzly without a guide, but I can have absolutely zero outdoor experience, live in Anchorage for 365 consecutive days and then take my inner city-dwelling son bear hunting as a second degree of kindred resident. No safety issues there, right? It’s all a game.
It’s time to let Alaskans control Alaska. What? They don’t trust us? Next time we just catch them and turn them loose in their backyards and grocery stores. What would AWA do – try to make friends with a brown bear? Shake hands with a wolf? Guidi’s analysis of the law in this case displays his bias and incompetence. I could write a book on federal and judicial meddling in Alaska game management and predator control – but it would never get past the censors…
Its always gets sticky when you have multiple predators banging on one prey species, especially so when those predators have other prey species on their menu. The result isn’t dynamic like Lynx and Rabbits. These predators numbers don’t crash but the prey species are kept low and never can recover.
BTW, Brown and Grizzly trophy hunts should be curtailed in game units where bear numbers are plentiful. Mid range bears should be culled, but leave the apex bears alone since they kill lots of smaller bears. Killing the big boys off results in the smaller bears survival.
Good comment Oosik! Now tell that to APHA. Even some of their oldest and ardent members will admit that’s exactly what happening in many places around AK. A pile of mid-range and sub-adult bears but no big boys anymore. They grow slow and it takes a lot of time and food etc to grow big trophy bears. Yet that’s what all the guided hunters want. “I want a ten footer!!” Ugh. Most times those big rugs get folded up and never hang on a wall. APHA is working itself out of business. Money and politics rule in wildlife management.
The only good bear is a dead bear.
The people of Alaska deserve to know what is happening to their wildlife and the wholesale slaughter or over 150 brown bears (many left to rot in the wilderness) by ‘F&G Fake Management’ was a sneaky and underhanded way to f*** around with the balance of nature. If you want to live in a place without any bears there’s an entire country on the other side of Canada that wiped out their once abundant wildlife so you can move if you are too afraid of wild animals. Bears are poached or baited by unethical hunters constantly outside of our regulations but nobody factors those numbers into their overall population studies. California has a big old brown bear on it’s flag….We can easily go the same way of looking at what once was…..
have you ever been to the mulchatna region?
ever seen a bear or wolf in the wild?
were you planning to use any of these bears in even a non-consumptive manner?
Please post the statistics you have on “poached or baited by unethical hunters constantly outside of our regulations”. I’m intrigued and there must be a lot of that. Please post the actual verifiable statistics. I’ll wait.
There are still large numbers of bears in that area. Mater of fact the brown bear numbers in the rest of those game units are high and increasing. If the cause is bears, there’s no issue with population.
The caribou, Moose and sheep are the game populations that often can’t maintain maximum sustain yield. It’s a fact that wolves and bears can cause a predator pit, where all species suffer.
Here’s why it’s left up to ADF&G. At the cost of $32000 for a brown bear hunt. If ADF&G would not charge so much for out of staters to go on the hunt of a lifetime for Brown bears the state wouldn’t have to burden the cost of doing it themselves, culling so to say. Now they have to deal with the outcry from environmental groups. Make the hunts more affordable for out of staters.
It ain’t ADFG. Try the Alaska Professional Hunters Association and a complicit BOG and legislature. They lobby for laws which restrict others and require non-residents to hire a guide for some species (and they’ve tried to include other species as well). It’s just business but it does happen. That is just one of the reasons the State of AK does predator control.
Comments are closed.