Grizzly Bear Plan

Grizzly Bear Plan

Rick Worthington
Rick Worthington
Grizzly Bear Plan

Ranchers in Wyoming and Idaho have long had issues with Grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area as they prey upon livestock on their grazing lands. What if some of those bears were moved, and introduced into other areas, such as the Sierra Nevada Mountains?

A conservation group is suing the government to force it to update the federal recovery plan for grizzly bears and wants them to reintroducing the bears into previous habitats, such as the Sierra Nevada, the southern Rockies and even the Grand Canyon region in Arizona.

Collette Adkins is with the Center for Biological Diversity and says.

"The main goal of our lawsuit is to get the Fish and Wildlife Service to at least analyze these additional areas and determine whether reintroduction is feasible or not," she states.

She says reintroducing bears to parts of their former range is a crucial step toward recovering them under the Endangered Species Act, and potentially could triple the grizzly population in the lower 48 states.

"It's a big project," she stresses. "Reintroducing a species isn't something where we just filed this lawsuit.

"What we want is the analysis. We want them to pull together the team of people to take a look at it because they said they would and it's the only way to really recover the species."

Ranchers - naturally - are somewhat resistant to the plan, and say the bears are no longer an endangered species, and the bear population is soaring.

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