Page 46 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest what some had known since the news of 760 broke. He trapped the bear. Well, not so much trapped as snared. He caught 760 in a leg snare he had rigged by the deer, and then he tranquilized the bear, bundled it into his familiar green mobile culvert trap, and delivered it to its last stop, the Game and Fish facility in Cody. The evidence suggests that Ellsbury likes killing bears. In September 2013, he was so eager to kill one that he pulled the trigger when confronted with the prospect of losing his trophy if he didn’t shoot in the “one opening before the bear would be gone,” even though he claimed to have had only a “couple of seconds to judge if it was a black bear or grizzly bear.” His desire for the kill outweighed any misgivings he harbored about misidentification, and cost him $10,000. A year on, he had no such worries. The grizzlies he contributed to killing in Clark were taken out with Servheen’s blessing, under the veneer of the redshirt of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “The individual actions of one man don’t reflect a whole department,” was Chris Servheen’s closing thought on Ellsbury and WGFD, but in this instance it can be argued that they do. 46