Alaska to let bears be killed from planes to protect human food supply in rural areas

The Alaska Board of Game announced Tuesday it will allow state wildlife officials to shoot bears from the air. This move is the latest "intensive management" practices targeting bears and wolves, including gassing wolf pups in their dens, reports Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times. A similar measure is being considered in Western states to protect livestock and wildlife from wolves. (Alaska Wildlife Voyages photo)

The measure is an attempt to protect from predators a "precarious population of musk oxen" in the high Arctic. It's also "designed to appease long-standing concerns among a broad swath of Alaskans about declining populations of moose and caribou, upon which much of rural Alaska depend for food." The National Park Service says aerial shooting, along with other debated methods like snaring and trapping, should not be used in Alaska's 19 million acres of federal wildlife refuges. "They have a management policy which specifically says you don't manipulate the population of one species to benefit the hunting of another," said Jim Stratton, the state's director for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Other opponents cite humanitarian concerns and say shooting, snaring and trapping conflict with scientists' advice about wildlife management. But Murphy reports the state Department of Fish and Game "has its hands tied" because a 1994 state law mandates "intensive management" policies in "crucial" parts of the state to protect human food supply. Some game officials say stronger methods should be used because current and proposed methods don't target female bears and their cubs, which they say must be killed to create meaningful population declines. (Read more)