SOURCE: New York Times
DATE: June 9, 2020
SNIP: Baiting grizzly bears with doughnuts soaked in bacon grease. Using spotlights to blind and shoot hibernating black bear mothers and their cubs in their dens. Gunning down swimming caribou from motorboats.
Hunting methods that for years were decried by wildlife protectors and finally banned as barbaric by the Obama administration will be legal again on millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness in time for the warm July weather.
The National Park Service policy published the new rules in the Federal Register on Tuesday, reversing Obama administration rules and giving trophy hunters, outfitters and Alaskans 30 days to prepare to return to national preserves in Alaska with the revived practices. Among the reinstated tactics: killing wolves and coyotes, including pups, during the season when mothers wean their young, and using dogs to hunt bears.
Animal rights and wildlife protection groups condemned the rule as allowing inhumane trophy hunting of wild brown and black bears.
“This would allow extreme cruel killing methods on over 20 million acres of national preserves in Alaska,” said Laura Smythe, a staff attorney with the Humane Society of the United States.
The initial dispute stemmed from conflicting approaches over how Alaska manages predators in the state. The Alaska board of game allows such baiting tactics to kill bears and wolves in order to ensure enough moose, caribou and other game are available for hunters. The National Park Service, however, is charged with protecting wildlife populations including predators like bears.
In 2015 the Obama administration codified the Park Service’s role by enacting a rule that eliminated sport hunting and trapping on federal public lands in Alaska. The new rule says state hunting regulations should take priority over federal ones.
[ED NOTE: Only a sick and sadistic culture would allow this. We live in a sick and sadistic culture.]