Page 49 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest nothing about the case in the news section on the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s website. Had the grizzly mauled Ellsbury it would have been a different story, but as all the bear did was die in their colleague’s thirst for another trophy, they didn’t deem it to be in the public interest to disclose the information when, in fact, it was simply never in their interests to draw attention to it. DeBolt’s and Talbott’s message is Governor Mead’s and Grizzly Czar Servheen’s: that the grizzly is recovered, there are too many grizzlies, there is not enough suitable habitat for any more grizzlies, grizzlies are lurking in the shadows just waiting to eat you, and grizzlies need to be managed by trophy hunting so that they will regain any fear of humans they have supposedly lost. Frank Van Manen even attributes high cub mortality to the rampant population boom. “Cub survival is lower because males are killing them,” he asserts, without any suggestion that the underlying cause could be undernourished mothers or difficulty finding once reliable food sources to sustain lactation and supplement the diets of their cubs. That year, in Yellowstone National Park, two grizzlies were apparently killed by other grizzlies, and of the twenty grizzly mortalities the IGBST recognized in the 50 percent of the ecosystem it monitored for mortality, only 49