ng a no death-count zone around the bears’ conservation area and turning over management to the states with game and fish commissions strongly biased against predators, supporting elk and deer populations and emphasizing predator trophy hunting may end dispersal, Mattson and others say.
“Watching them (the Idaho, Montana and Wyoming game and fish commissions) on what they have done with black bears, what they have done with mountains lions, and what they have done with wolves, is that to the extent that they perceive these predators to have negative impacts on harvestable surplus of large herbivores, they will kill these large carnivores,” says Mattson, who is sharply critical of the scientific methods employed by government scientists claiming they are biased to support political agendas.
“And to the extent that these large carnivores are a pest for ranchers and agricultural interests, they will kill predators,” he adds.
Raising the Stakes
To legally justify its decision to remove the Yellowstone grizzly population from Endangered Species Act protections before the rest of the grizzly population is no longer threatened, the Fish and Wildlife Service determined the Yellowstone grizzlies constitute a “Distinct Population Segment” that has reached the carrying capacity of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and therefore should be removed from the endangered species list.
Multiple lawsuits potentially to be filed later this summer are expected to argue, in part, that the use of a Distinct Population Segment was primarily intended to allow the Fish and Wildlife Service to list isolated populations under the Endangered Species Act, not as a mechanism to delist an isolated population like the Yellowstone grizzlies without first assessing the overall impact of removing the Yellowstone population on the remaining bears.
The Washington, D.C. circuit court of appeals issued a decision Aug. 1 that could undercut the government’s Distinct Population Segment approach to removing grizzly bears from the endangered species list. The appeals court vacated the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove Great Lakes gray wolves from the endangered species list using Distinct Population Segment as a basis for its decision.
The appeals court said the agency does not have the power “to delist an already-protected species by balkanization.” In a unanimous decision, the court ruled the agency “cannot circumvent the Endangered Species Act’s explicit delisting standards by riving an existing listing into a recovered sub-group and a leftover group that becomes an orphan to the law.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service used a similar approach when the agency removed the Yellowstone grizzly population from the endangered species list without considering the impact of that action on the surviving grizzly populations.
“The Endangered Species Act is intended to restore critically imperiled species across their native habitat, not to claim a recovery success story by restoring an isolated subpopulation alone, and effectively turning our National Parks into proverbial zoos,” says Kelly Nokes, carnivore advocate for WildEarth Guardians, a Missoula, Montana conservation group.
The upcoming legal clash between the Fish and Wildlife Service and environmental groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity, which publishes The Revelator) over the legality of removing the Yellowstone grizzlies from the endangered species list comes with high political risk.
Some conservation organizations, including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, are worried that a successful legal challenge to the Yellowstone grizzly delisting rule may create a serious backlash with possible negative outcomes for the bear.
Byrd, the group’s executive director, says it is unlikely that a new grizzly bear delisting rule written under the Trump administration would be better than the current rule that was primarily developed under the Obama administration.
She also worries that Congress may react by passing laws that would remove all grizzly bears from the endangered species list. And, eve