Alaska Wildlife Officials Cleared to Resume Hunting Bears from Helicopters – AOL
Moná Thomas
May 7, 2026
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Credit: Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Alaska wildlife officials can resume hunting bears from helicopters to protect the struggling Mulchatna caribou herd
- Conservation groups argue that the bear hunting program lacks sufficient data on bear populations and long-term sustainability
- The caribou herd has declined from 190,000 in the 1990s to about 16,280 in 2022
Alaska wildlife officials can resume hunting black and brown bears from helicopters as part of an ongoing, controversial effort to rebuild a struggling caribou herd.
According to CBS News, on Wednesday, May 6, Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman ruled against two conservation groups, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity, that are working to stop the predator-control program, allowing officials to resume hunting the state’s bears.
The decision comes just ahead of calving season for the Mulchatna caribou herd in southwest Alaska, when newborn calves are especially vulnerable to predators like bears and wolves.
Credit: Getty
State officials argue the program is necessary to help restore the once-massive herd, which historically served as a major food source for Alaska Native communities.
According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the herd once numbered around 190,000 animals before sharply declining beginning in the late 1990s. By 2019, the population had fallen to roughly 13,000. Last year, officials estimated the herd at about 16,280 animals.
Alaska killed 180 bears between 2023 and 2024 as part of the effort, most of them brown bears, along with 11 more last year, CBS News reported.
Alaska Wildlife Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity are seeking to end the bear-hunting program because they claim the Alaska Board of Game reinstated it without sufficient data on bear populations or on whether the level of killing is sustainable over the long term.
“We need to stop this disgraceful waste of the state’s limited resources and work based on science to protect all our wildlife,” Cooper Freeman, Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “The state simply hasn’t shown that the unrestrained killing of bears is going to help us get there.”
State attorneys defended the plan in court filings, saying officials took a “hard look” at bear population factors before moving forward. They also argued that the caribou herd has shown signs of improvement since predator removals began in 2023.
The Alaska Wildlife Alliance claims that bears are not a significant threat to the Mulchatna caribou and that wildlife officials could take other steps to protect the herd.
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“Bear predation isn’t even in the top three identified causes of mortality among the Mulchatna herd (and golden eagles have carried off more caribou calves than bears and wolves in some study years). There is no data to support that predator control programs, and the mass killings of wolves and bears, will recover the Mulchatna herd,” the Alaska Wildlife Alliance wrote in an article about the Mulchatna Predator Control Program.
Read the original article on People