Experts say grizzlies could suffer. Some biologists worry that bears aren’t genetically diverse enough for delisting. By Cory Hatch. Jackson Hole News and Guide.

This has been known for quite a while. The solution seems simple to me, although the anti-introduction extremists who now dominate the Dept. of Interior, and the grizzly bear purists, won’t like the answer. Bring in female bears from British Columbia at the rate or one or two a year, for a decade. There is a plan to truck down a grizzly from Glacier NP every decade or so , but the Glacier bears are not sufficiently different genetically from the Yellowstone bears. One per decade won’t solve the problem for a hundred years or more, and the livelihood of mortality of one new bear not familiar with the area is very high before she mates, bears and rears cubs.

 
About The Author

Ralph Maughan

Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.

One Response to Experts say Yellowstone area grizzlies could suffer from inbreeding

  1. elkhunter says:

    they should just trade bears. give them 2, we get 2. Population stays the same, you get different genetics. They did it with buffalo on Antelope Island here in UT.

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‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."

~ Edward Abbey

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