Will wolf outrage undermine state's efforts to manage grizzlies?

The reason? A lack of certainty about how Wyoming will manage grizzlies outside of the heart of the Greater Yellowstone and, specifically, outside of 20,000 square miles of land that state and federal land managers have deemed “suitable” grizzly habitat. That area is known as the “demographic monitoring area” or “DMA” for short.

“I don’t think anybody clearly knows how Wyoming is going to manage grizzlies outside the DMA,” said Chris Servheen, who served 35 years as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s grizzly bear recovery coordinator and is now president of the Montana Wildlife Federation.

If grizzlies are delisted, Wyoming plans to allow closely regulated grizzly hunting within the demographic monitoring area, but officials have signaled they may use more liberal seasons in other parts of the state. In 2018, Wyoming said it would use those outer ring hunts to drive down the grizzly population outside of the DMA, echoing how a predator zone is used to depress wolf populations in 85% of the state.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently late on a decision about whether to remove grizzlies’ Endangered Species Act protections in the Greater Yellowstone and, in an initial filing, service officials have already said they have concerns about grizzly regulations in Montana.

At the time, they did not specifically call out Wyoming.

Asked whether the Daniel wolf incident could impact the Fish and Wildlife Service’s opinion of delisting grizzlies, Servheen said “it might.”

“The concern that I think people have is that they’re going to make grizzly management like wolf management,” Servheen said.

But grizzlies will not be managed like wolves, said Brian Nesvik, director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

“First, nobody’s interested in having grizzlies managed as predatory animals in any part of the state,” Nesvik said. “The second thing that’s really important is there is existing law on grizzly bears that has been there for a very, very long time that’s different from wolves.”

The hand wringing comes after Cody Roberts, of Daniel, was publicly accused of running over a wolf with a snowmobile, duct taping its mouth shut and taking it into a Daniel bar. Wildlife advocates and national animal rights groups are furious that Roberts was only fined $250 for possessing a live wolf and called for changes to predator management. They want to ban running predators over with snowmobiles, which is legal, and extend animal cruelty protections to predators — animals that officials say currently aren’t protected.

As it stands, wolves cannot be hunted in Yellowstone or Grand Teton National Park. But Wyoming considers wolves “trophy game” in areas surrounding the park, where they can be hunted, and “predators” in the remaining 85% of the state, a designation that means people can legally kill an unlimited number of the canines with only a few restrictions. Wyoming also considers coyotes, jackrabbits, porcupines, raccoons, red fox, skunks and stray cats “predators.”

The incident has put the spotlight on Wyoming’s wolf management policies, which had largely faded from the fore after controversial wolf hunts on Yellowstone National Park’s border in Montana, and after Idaho passed laws intended to cull wolf populations by about 60%.

The incident may also shine a light on Wyoming’s grizzly policy, at least according to Servheen and Smith, who have a combined 60 years of experience managing wildlife and federal policy.

In contrast to wolves, Wyoming law deems grizzlies “trophy game animals” across the Equality State, meaning the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission has to regulate how humans “take,” or kill, the bears via hunting or management removals after conflict with livestock or other private property. In other words, unregulated “take” is unlikely, based on past regulations and what Nesvik told the News&Guide.

In 2018, grizzly bears were briefly delisted, and the Game and Fish Commission approved a grizzly hunt that a court order stifled before it began. The 2018 policies will likely form the basis of any future hunt in Wyoming, Nesvik said. Within the demographic monitoring area, those policies would have allowed 12 bears to be hunted. In areas outside of the demographic monitoring area, draft regulations would have allowed another 12 bears to be harvested.

Outside of the DMA, or the heart of the Greater Yellowstone, the state argues that Wyoming is not well suited for grizzlies. There’s too much potential for conflict with humans, a similar thought process that underpins the predator zone Wyoming uses for wolf management.

Despite concerns from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wyoming proposed the predator zone as a compromise for ranchers who were worried about wolves killing livestock. Rather than paying ranchers in the predator zone for cows and sheep killed by wolves, the state decided it would give them the ability to kill wolves without limit. After years of litigation and Fish and Wildlife Service objections, the plan stuck in 2017 when a court ordered wolves delisted in Wyoming.

There are, however, key differences between the predator zone and the 2018 grizzly hunt proposed outside of the Greater Yellowstone.

The grizzly hunt wouldn’t have extended across the Equality State. Eastern and southern Wyoming would have been closed to hunting.

There were also limitations on how grizzlies could be hunted.

While running a wolf over with a snowmobile is perfectly legal in the predator zone, Nesvik said that sort of action would not have flown for grizzlies due to their “trophy” status — and will not in the future.

“It’s currently illegal, and I don’t see that changing anytime,” he said.

While there were questions about whether baiting grizzlies would be allowed in 2018, Nesvik said he doesn’t see “any appetite for that” now.

The biggest difference, however, is that Wyoming would have capped how many grizzlies can be hunted anywhere in the state. In 2023, the department’s large carnivore supervisor, Dan Thompson, told WyoFile that, due to population increases and a new method of counting bears, the department would authorize hunting 39 grizzlies within the demographic monitoring area if the bears are delisted. If the state used the same 1-to-1 ratio for hunting in and outside of the DMA that it did in 2018, it would have authorized a 39-bears hunt on the outside. But Thompson didn’t say what that external would look like.

“To be responsible, we’d still have limits in place,” Thompson told WyoFile. “But we could potentially use harvests in a heavier fashion outside the DMA.”

If a hunt is authorized in 2024, Nesvik couldn’t say how many grizzlies Wyoming would allow to be hunted using the current population estimate of roughly 965 bears in the demographic monitoring area.

“It would be extremely conservative,” Nesvik said. “We wouldn’t implement anything that didn’t have a cap.”

Servheen, nonetheless, said he has concerns about grizzlies being managed one way on one side of a human-drawn line, and then being managed another way on the other side. For example, inside the demographic monitoring area, bears are typically relocated at least once before being killed after getting into conflict with livestock.

In the periphery, Servheen worries that bears will just be killed, even if they spend part of their lives in the heart of the ecosystem and part of their time outside. How many grizzlies are killed is important, Servheen said, because they reproduce less than wolves.

“They do not have the reproductive resilience to sustain excessive mortality,” Servheen said of grizzly bears.

Where the Fish and Wildlife Service will land on grizzlies remains to be seen — as will the Daniel incident’s impact on their decision.

“Does this incident speak to poor state management?” Smith said. “No, it’s one wolf.”

But while the incident may not impact policy, Smith said it will impact politics and public trust in Wyoming’s wolf management structure.

“In the political realm, this is a big problem,” Smith said. “It erodes trust in institution and agencies. It’s not there. And that’s why you’re getting a backlash from a lot of the public wanting relisting.”

Whether Wyoming regains trust, Smith said, will depend on how the state responds. Smith would like to see killing animals with snow machines banned, and animal cruelty statutes applied to predators.

State officials are currently beginning to contemplate wolf policy, including via an informal group that Gov. Mark Gordon has assembled.

The News&Guide asked Nesvik whether Game and Fish would support either of the changes Smith and wildlife advocates are championing.

“The governor has put together a group of folks that is having a discussion about the question that you asked,” Nesvik said. “We’re going to evaluate this as a state. Not as a Department of Agriculture, not as a Game and Fish Department, but as the state of Wyoming.

“There’s probably going to be more to follow on that,” Nesvik added.

Smith, for his part, said he is “big time” worried about politics.

“When people get criticized, you can do one of two things: You can change your mind or dig in,” Smith said. “And when Wyoming gets criticized by the world, they tend to dig in.”