The agency will get people killed by allowing the feeding of black and grizzly bears on lands visited by hikers and other forest users.
WASHINGTON — Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy today condemned a proposed rule from the National Park Service (NPS) to unwind a very conservative 2024 regulation banning the use of food bait to hunt black and grizzly bears on roughly 20 million acres of national preserves in Alaska. The 2024 rule walked back a far more comprehensive 2015 rulemaking that restricted a set of ruthless predator and caribou killing practices on these lands, including bear baiting, shooting swimming caribou, and shooting newborn bears and wolves in or emerging from their dens.
This latest proposed rule, scheduled for publication in the Federal Register this week, would rescind the Park Service’s recent prohibition on bear baiting — a hunting method that involves placing piles or barrels of human foods such as pastries, grease, dog food, or other human-scented items and shooting bears while they are feeding.
In its 2024 rulemaking, the NPS provided details on why bear baiting is particularly dangerous by conditioning grizzly bears and black bears to seek out human foods. Wildlife scientists and other experts warned that the practice can increase risks to hikers, campers, and other visitors to national preserves by habituating bears — including immensely powerful and fast grizzly bears — to food sources associated with people.
“The National Park Service should never have played host to baiting of grizzly bears and black bears,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “The 2024 rulemaking got it right in pinpointing that bear baiting is deadly for bears as well as hikers and other forest users who encounter bears trained to search out human foods.”
Pacelle added that “dumping piles of food for bears to gorge on and then shooting them while they feed is not hunting; it’s an ambush.” Pacelle led ballot measures to ban bear baiting in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, collaborating with fair-chase hunters on all these campaigns.
Pacelle said the proposal represents the latest swing in a decade-long policy battle over wildlife management on Alaska’s national preserves. In 2015, the NPS adopted regulations to prevent the State of Alaska from imposing extreme predator-killing policies on federal lands managed as part of the national park system. Those rules limited a range of controversial practices, including certain forms of bear baiting and predator-control measures intended to artificially inflate populations of moose and caribou for hunters — an unsound wildlife management practice at odds with the value systems that govern management of all NPS units.
The Trump administration rescinded that rule in 2020, allowing state-authorized hunting practices to be applied more broadly on national preserves. That action was later challenged in court by wildlife-protection organizations.
In 2024, the NPS issued a narrower rule that at least restored a prohibition on bear baiting, concluding that the practice conflicted with the agency’s wildlife-management policies and public-safety responsibilities. Now the agency is proposing to reverse that position yet again, citing new policy directives aimed at expanding resource use in Alaska.
Federal land managers, from the National Park Service to the U.S. Forest Service, routinely advise visitors to “never feed bears” and to properly secure food and garbage to prevent dangerous encounters.
“Federal agencies spend enormous resources educating the public never to feed bears because it creates potentially deadly human-bear conflicts,” Pacelle added. “It makes no sense for federal land managers to invite trophy hunters to do exactly that — deliberately bait bears with human foods so they can shoot them with their head in a feed barrel.”
Pacelle also noted that legislation was introduced in the 119th Congress to address the issue nationwide. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., recently introduced the Don’t Feed the Bears Act, H.R. 4422, to prohibit the use of bait to hunt bears on any federal lands, including NPS lands.