Vote five stars yes here....
Posted on 11/15/2005 12:18:32 PM PST by La Enchiladita
WASHINGTON - Noting that the grizzly bear population in the Yellowstone area has thrived in recent years, the Bush administration on Tuesday announced that it plans to remove federal protections for the animals in the areas around the national park.
"A population that was once plummeting towards extinction is now recovered," Interior Secretary Gale Norton said in making the announcement. "These bears are now no longer endangered" and should be removed from the Endangered Species Act listing.
The Interior Department, through the Fish and Wildlife Service, implements the Endangered Species Act.
"We are sure that these bears will have the habitat that they need," Norton added.
Significant recovery Federal wildlife officials estimate that more than 600 grizzly bears live in the region surrounding Yellowstone in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. They also describe as healthy an annual growth rate over the past decade of 4 to 7 percent.
Those numbers represent a significant recovery. Only 200 or 250 grizzlies were in that region in 1975, when grizzly bears in the lower 48 states were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Once in the hundreds of thousands, the bear population dwindled in the West early in the last century in large part because of hunting and destruction of the animals habitat.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
then I'd say that the back porch is in the wrong place...
Thanks for the find.
Bears inside of Yellowstone are still protected...No Hunting inside the Park, generally.
It is only the Grizzly Bears outside the Park that can be hunted, maybe. There are state hunting controls and seasons and permits off the federal park to be followed.
So how soon do you think we can get a licence to go hunting?
The next step in the delisting process is publication in the Federal Register. Public comment will be taken for several months and then changes will be made to the proposal before further hearings.
The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee is comprised of state and federal agencies from Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The committee began in 1983 to support the grizzly bear recovery effort in the Yellowstone Park region.
The Sierra Club could delay this even more.
Maybe years until hunting is legal.
I'll get flamed for this, but 600 bears doesn't seem like very many to me. I think it's too soon to declare the problem has been solved. And the timing is idiotic; with all of Bush's other problems right now, does the admin need to give the Dems another chance to make an issue of something, to accuse him of insensitivoty to the environment etc?
I watched the PBS special as linked here:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/thegrizzly/index.html
During the program, there was some testimony from locals about the increased frequency of bears on their property, as well as other encroachments, and footage of a town hall meeting to support the de-listing.
None of that is mentioned in the narrative on the PBS website; it is all sympathetic to the NRDC and Sierra Club, as well as offering such propaganda to teachers.
Four other grizzly populations in other parts of the lower 48 states will continue to be protected as threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Alaskan grizzly bears, which number about 30,000, were never listed under the act.
So, there are a lot more than 600 grizzly bears in the U.S., and those 600, according to the article are increasing at 4% per year. That's enough for me.
As the website you referred me to indicates, the grizzley is a subspeceis of arctos, to wit, horribilis.
In my neck of the woods they winter on the Delaware. Ya can't get rid of the fishy taste !! Ha !
I second that. Ostrich is the best.
More importantly, horribilis is the only current member of Ursus arctos, much as man is the only member of homo sapien, and therefore the full designation "homo sapien sapien" is redundant, as is ursus arctos horibilis.
"Subspiecies" does not have a universally recognized taxonomic definition. As applied to ursus arctos, it merely is used to designate range.
It is not just the harvesting of the Bears...
Some of the bears need to learn that humans are not their first choice for food. Some of the bears need to learn to eat wild food in the forest.
Second, this would begin to use science with scientists to make the decision of how many acres per bear.
Is 600 bears the right number for these acres? That answer will come over time from the scientists once the politics is reduced.
Currently it is politicians, lawyers and judges with no scientific training making these scientific decisions. It seems best to get emotional politics reduced in the decision process and increase the use of science in the decision making process.
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