That is just mumbo jumbo legaleze for a species that has actually strengthened in numbers if you look at the ENTIRE population in the North America. Just cuz some folk are smart enough to rid themselves of this predator does not mean in any sense it is a threatened species. It is in fact a thriving population increasing in the Lower 48 by 3% each year. The estimated population before man was 50-100,000 in all of North America from Mexico to Canada and Alaska. It actually was a plains animal in many western states.
Today, the total North American population which is INCREASING is about 55-60,000 in a more confined area. In Canada, they have spread eastward into areas that they did not populate historically.
A thought experiment, then. Suppose humans populate every habitable area for a certain <insert dangerous animal here>. Are you then perfectly okay with seeing that species go extinct? If not, at some limit, humans who live on the fringes of the wilderness need to restrain their own behavior with regard to endangered animals.
With a grizzly population on the order of 1000-2000 in the lower 48, is it so unreasonable to suggest that they should only be shot if someone's life is in danger?
We can't have it both ways. If so few grizzlies still represent an unacceptable threat that people in those areas are not willing to live with, public policy needs to be changed to allow them to go extinct in the Northwestern U.S., leaving them to western Canada and Alaska.
Whether such a public policy would be wise is another question, but people in those areas need to get laws changed so that grizzlies can be eliminated, or they need to live with grizzlies as long as the bears are not posing an immediate threat to humans.
The pigs were not his livelihood. The article says his kids were raising the pigs. He doesn't get much sympathy from me, living on the edge of the wilderness and keeping animals in a pen. You don't have to be Nostradamus to realize those animals are in danger. Killing endangered animals to protect pets living outdoors is simply not acceptable. I'm sure there are bear-proof animal enclosures, but they're probably expensive and unsightly. Nevertheless, if he couldn't protect his outdoor pets any other way except by killing endangered grizzlies, maybe he should have reevaluated his pet situation before he killed a grizzly and got (predictably) charged for it.
As for the non-imminent threat to his children, that seems like a post-hoc defense, but even if that was the real reason for killing the bear, maybe he should have taken his children inside instead?
He lives in extreme northern Idaho. What does he expect? The article mentions that he is 5 miles away from the nearby designated Grizzly recovery zone... as if that's supposed to mean something. Unless there's some secret genetic engineering project going on up there, wildlife, including the grizzly, doesn't read maps... even if they could, I don't see much of an effort to airdrop a bunch of maps in grizzly territory informing them exactly where they should and shouldn't roam.
Let's be realistic. Even if grizzly bears shouldn't be listed as endangered, if you live near grizzly territory how is it productive to kill bears except in immediate self defense? Killing one or three bears that stray onto your property is not going to accomplish much in the long term if there's a stable (or growing) population nearby.
Would taking grizzlies off the endangered list be a solution? (Which apparently is the subject of a current federal case.*) Wouldn't people -- hunters, or people living on the fringes of the Yellowstone area -- then start killing the bears whenever they are seen, quickly endangering the bears again?
Not to mention, he lives so close to Canada that even if Grizzlies were effectively extinct in the CONUS, they could probably still get lost and
accidentally cross the Canadian border and terrorize him again.
*
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unl...-population-is-at-its-highest-in-decades.html