News from Yellowstone: please see Terry Tempest William’s post on my Home page, “Don’t kill this grizzly bear.”

The news is that Yellowstone Park officials will kill this mother bear, as they said they would from the beginning. Despite all your pleas for logic, fairness and humane treatment of this grizzly family, a mother and two cubs of the year, they will be killed.

A friend of mine, along with other insiders who work in Yellowstone park, actively lobbied and talked to Kerry Gunther and other YNP officials. To their credit, these public servants at least listened to alternatives to the destruction of this bear family and, although they were inflexible about euthanizing the mother grizzly, they considered placing the two cubs in a zoo-like setting, In particular the Yellowstone Discovery Center in West Yellowstone. This private educational center did it’s best towards accommodating the entire bear family. This discussion included taking in the two cubs and at least considering raising fund to acquire a larger area to suite the older female grizzly who has lived a wild bear life for 20 years. I think this kind of discussion commendable on all sides. And it wouldn’t have taken place without all your letters, calls and pleas to spare the grizzy family’s lives.

The effort failed for two reasons:

First, Yellowstone National Park decided, privately for unstated and unexplained matters of “public safety,” to kill this, and presumably any bear, who is implicated in a human fatality. This is wrong, based on no science and against the NPS Organic Act mission, which is celebrating it’s 100th anniversary in 2016. This incident was a purely defensive, natural response of a mother bear protecting her cubs. This particular female grizzly had a long and tolerant history towards human visitors, however rude and clumsy. My friend:

“It looks like the bear involved was a very familiar, older bear nicknamed, Blaze who had two COY this year. She has been viewed, photographed and filmed by thousands of people over the years with never a shred of aggression even while people chased her and her cubs to get a better shot. Apparently traps have been set and the decision to kill her has already been made.”

The mauling was a human-induced event. The hiker, however experienced, did everything wrong: he got too close to a sleeping mother grizzly, then he ran and tried to fight back. Doing these three things–stumbling in too close to an unaware mother bear, running and fighting back–are about the only way you can get get killed by a mother grizzly.

The park service of old use to treat these defensive attacks, fatal or not, as the natural responses they indeed are. No more. Since the fatal mauling of a Michigan man in 2010, they have hardened their response and changed their policy–if they have a policy other than what’s seems safest to preclude litigation at the time it’s happening. And they never discussed with or even disclosed to the public–concerned taxpayer how they arrived at this policy. Fear of litigation is what made them condemn the natural, defensive-acting mother bear to death. That cash, the litigation slush funds, doesn’t come out of their pockets; it’s our dough. YNP could at least discuss that issue with us.

The second reason is a single bureaucrat has decided to kill the cubs. This proclamation was made after YNP officials, apparently in all good faith, considered sending them to a zoo-like facility. That decency by YNP was overruled: the cubs must be killed. My friend:

“So we got all the way to the alter on adopting these cubs and Chris Servheen said no. If these cubs are euthanized after we offered to take them and privately raise the money…”

Chris Servheen is known as the “Grizzly Czar” and is the boss of the FWS Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee; his chief and perhaps single agenda is to formally “Delist” the Yellowstone, which means to strip the grizzly of all its protections under the ESA and turn “management” over to the states of WY, MT and ID who have promised to immediately issue “Trophy Grizzly Bear Hunt” permits. This removal of ESA protections, as I have argued in my own “Don’t Delist” articles, will irretrievably push the Yellowstone grizzly down the road to regional extinction within years. The boiled-down logic is when mortality (deaths) greatly exceed grizzly births, extinction is usually unavoidable in a species like the griz with exceedingly low reproductive capacities.

So that, my friends, is pretty much the story: the undeserved killing of the mother grizzly and her blood is on the hands of Yellowstone National Park officials. The slaughter of the innocent cubs lies on those of the Griz Czar Chris Sevheen. These people owe you an open explanation for their decisions. They also need to share the data and forensics they used to make their unethical and illogical calls on our innocent bears. Please demand they do.

For the wild, Doug Peacock

http://www.dougpeacock.net/blog/categories/listings/murder-in-yellowstone-grizzly-family-is-sacrificed-for-fear-of-litigation.html

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