Page 44 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest sagebrush and that grass which some were destined to war with each other over in the “civilizing” of Wyoming. Park County can take credit for the appearance of the occasional grizzly that does trundle into Clark, as its failure to manage its facilities conditioned some bears to seek extra calories there. For years the Park County landfill in Clark looked like a slaughterhouse, with a half-excavated carcass pit strewn with the limbs of game and domestic animals that provided a smorgasbord for those hyperphagic bears that winded it. As recently as November 2011, former Wyoming Game and Fish Large Carnivore Management Section Supervisor, Mark Bruscino, criticized the mismanagement of the landfill. “The landfill will close to carcass dumping in the spring and will convert to a bear proof municipal waste transfer station by the end of the year. Hopefully, that will fix the problem,” he wrote then. The improvements were a long time coming, and that October two grizzly sows and three cubs were removed. Bruscino knew in 2011, as did I, that grizzlies deprived of whitebark pine were trying to survive on Russian olive drupe near convicted drug smuggler Stewart Bost’s derelict “Cocaine Ranch” on the Clark’s Fork, but that didn’t fit the delisting narrative either. Grizzlies “feasting on Russian olives” because of a suddenly expanding population 44