Board Of Game Approves ADFG Petition To Create Emergency Action On Predator Control

A few days after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game petitioned the state’s Board of Game to halt a judge’s ruling that called ADFG’s predator eradication process unconstitutional, the Board has approved the petition for emergency action. Here’s more from the Alaska Beacon:

The board granted an Alaska Department of Fish and Game petition for emergency action to carry out a third season of shooting bears and wolves to keep them from preying on the ailing Mulchatna Caribou Herd. In the past two years, the predator control program — carried out in late spring and early summer within the herd’s range — killed 175 brown bears, five black bears and 19 wolves, according to the department.

The emergency finding is warranted to help a herd that fell from a peak of about 200,000 in the late 1990s to about 13,000 now, too low to allow any hunting, board members said on the final day of a weeklong meeting in Anchorage.

“Right now, we have a herd that has shut down where a large number of people in Western Alaska can’t put caribou in their freezer right now. And it’s not going to grow if they don’t have calf survival,” said Stosh Hoffman, a board member from Bethel.

People in the region need to be able to hunt caribou because other food sources are uncertain, Hoffman said.