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.
