Theres plenty of Bear Biologists here to that don't want one either same with the wolves.
Think about how much money they get from grants studying them, take the money away and they dont have a job. Hunting season means less grant money.
That's one problem, we're all trying to survive and maintain.
People have made career's of studying Grizzly Bears, Wolves, FL Panthers, etc that are completely dependent on these 'recovery' management plans.
What fool would step up to the plate and say, 'it worked, we achieved our numbers, we're done'.
They'd be out looking for a job in a very limited field of work, their program would be over.
That alone is plenty enough incentive alone for one to skew the data. Could you truly blame them?
When we had a very well managed hunt, we were allowed 25 bears a year or 17 sows, which ever came first.
I never recall a season being closed early to to the sow quota being achieved.
We were primarily hunting trophy bears, this meant big boars, nobody was targeting the smaller sows.
Our 25 bear quota not only included the sow clause, it included EVERY BEAR that died, problems bears that had to be euthanized, road kills, poached bears, the bears killed on the railroad tracks feeding on grain spills, EVERY BEAR!
In the later years, after having a active hunting season was being challenged the management became more intense.
They broke the state up into a schit pot of Grizzly hunting regions.
Each region had it's own allowable bear harvest numbers.
It was 3 bears or 1 sow for some regions, no bears for some regions, 2 bears or 1 sow for another and so forth.
Of course the state wide 25/17 number still ruled over all.
It wasn't long after the season was permanently closed the numbers of bears being killed yearly exceeded the numbers the hunt had ever killed.
This was mainly due to there being more problemed bears.
Bears showing up in places people didn't want them, like their backyards.
The numbers of sow's having to be killed was off the charts.
Anyone with even a thimble full of bear knowledge knows why.
More boars in a limited habitat, boars eat Cubs!
The sows were moving their Cubs out of their normal range for survival.
So then due to the recovery management plan, they were killing not only more bears but the wrong bears.
Last time I searched out the numbers of bears killed due to the screwed up management plan has been quite a few years back.
I recall it going from the mid 30s then up into the 40s rather fast.
After a quick check just now I am seeing this,
more than 300 bears have died in the past five years, according to federal data. By comparison, in the 10-year stretch from 2000 to 2009, 269 bears were killed in the same area, according to federal data.*
Their recovery program kills bears!So when these numbers don't work for them, what'd they do?
They raise the numbers...
Despite these studies and repeated federal court rulings, bear managers are still managing the population according to the 2016 conservation strategy, a document created to guide how bears would be managed after delisting. According to that strategy, a minimum population of 500 bears must be maintained, though current management practices aim to maintain a population of about 675 to 747 bears.
Under the 2016 strategy, wildlife managers changed allowable mortality levels to increase the number of bears that can be killed each year. Prior to the change, the bar was set by a 2012 study from the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team that recommended a maximum mortality of 7.6% of female bears and 15% of independent males as the baseline for maintaining a stable population in the GYE*.
The new allowable mortality rate allows 9% of independent females and 20% of independent males to die each year.
In fact, 10.8% of female grizzlies died in 2015. In 2016, 16.7% of independent age male grizzlies died. In 2017, 8.4% of female grizzlies died. In 2018, 15.3% of independent age male grizzlies died. The majority of bears that die are killed by wildlife managers as a consequence of predation on livestock or visiting human sites, according to a Montana Free Press analysis of federal data.*
I gotta go help my dog chase some squirrels up into the trees, I'll get back to this rant later.....or not.
* All this data is based on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
*https://montanafreepress.org/2020/07/15/recovered-to-death/
