Gray wolf in Denali National Park and Preserve / NPS
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is again planning to shoot hundreds of bears and wolves, according to a release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Part of the plan would involve stationing shooters in helicopters to fire on the animals from the air. Other gunners would operate from snowmobiles.
The plan is open for public comments until December 27.
The goal is to thin the population of bears and wolves by as much as 80% within a 20,000-acre area bordering Denali and Lake Clark national parks and preserves. The state would like to see populations of those animals in the area reduced to 35 wolves, 700 black bears, and 375 brown bears.
The proposal put forward by Alaska DFG suggests the state may need to shoot 100 wolves per year to maintain the population goal of 35 animals in the 20,000-acre area under consideration.
According to the release from PEER, the efforts to reduce the population of these predator animals is intended to increase the amount of moose and caribou near Denali and Lake Clark.
Reducing the amount of wolves and bears around the national parks, of course, means fewer of those animals enter the park, and fewer opportunities for visitors to these Alaskan national parks to see those animals. Potentially, that's a huge loss in tourism revenue for the state as wolf viewing is a big draw. According to a statement from PEER in 2019, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game elected to open wolf hunting in areas bordering Denali in 2010, the success rate of viewing wolves in the national park was 45%. By 2019, the success rate had plummeted to 1%.
“Alaska’s predator control policies are cruel and the epitome of penny wise and pound foolish," said PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse in the release. "The amount of tourist dollars from people seeking to view these predators in the wild dwarfs any incremental increase in hunting fee revenue the state hopes to realize.”
You can read the proposals here. And, if you'd like to submit a public comment, follow this link.
Comments
https://www.doi.gov/subsistence
to clarify this is what I was referecing- "subsistance" hunting.
To my knowledge no other are of the United States allows such a bending of the rules. If a "rural" community can not sustain and feed itself than it should cease to exist like every other community that went defunct in the lower 48. And I can think of a lot of them inlcluding the salton sea area of CA. Imagine if we allowed people that lived there to hunt year round. Just because.
I am sure the homeless in the US would like to catch and kill widlife for their enjoyment too. But they cant... And no one subsidized there food
If the predator population is not called to a reasonable amount for the area, these animals will die of starvation, which is a much more cruel way of dying for them. I support the game management operations to bring the population of predators back to a normal doable amount, even if it does Cut down on the sightseeing tours of tourism.
Human brutalitality know no limits. These managers want to play god. Where is their scientific, let alone anecdotal proof this works. Why do I nice t animal need to always die instead of other methods to be utilized to either raise prey POPULATIONS (better) or perhaps relocate to predators. You kill off members of social organizations. Nature takes out the weak. Man hunts for the trophies. That is why things like Lyme's disease, chronic wasting disease etc. is allowed to proliferate. Nature's balance was created and fine tuned over millions of years. Man's capacity to mass kill for the sake of killing has evolved in less than the last 200 years, wiping out whole species in his arrogance negatively effecting all humans touch.
Aerial shooting is execution and a cull; it's not our human place to intervene and play God in the determination of what animals need population control. Fod and Mother Nature and science will regulate the popuaions in a natural way without out barbaric and inhumane interference. Reducing the wolves to a poppilation of 35 in the middle of winter will decimate the wolf population. Tourists will boycott coming to Alaska as you are killing the wildlife they are coming to see.