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Old 03-03-2016, 11:52 PM   #1
xoxoxoBruce
The future is unwritten
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 71,105
Mar 4th, 2016: Blaze

This is Blaze, a Grizzly in Yellowstone national park.
She killed Lance Crosby, a 63-year-old man working in Yellowstone as a medic for the summer.
Then she and her cubs ate part of Crosby, and buried the rest for later.
Yellowstone Park Superintendent Dan Wenk decided to kill her and ship her cubs to the Toledo Zoo.
Jesus, Ohio, that's some cold shit.


In the week between the death of Crosby and Wenk's decision all hell broke loose.
Quote:
"Jack-booted executioner" is not a title that Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Dan Wenk ever aspired to own. But as a torrent of emails and phone calls began flooding his office last week—most from wildlife lovers in a desperate attempt to keep a mother grizzly bear alive—Wenk was given that label, and far worse.
Even legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, who has become a huge fan of grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, reached out to Wenk from her home in Bournemouth, England, pleading with him to spare a sow whose tragic encounter with a hiker had elevated her into the realm of international cause célèbre.
"In my 40 years working for the National Park Service, I have never encountered anything like the emotional outpouring we received in response to the fate of this bear," Wenk said, acknowledging that members of his staff were also left shell-shocked.
Wenk consulted with bear-management specialists trying to decide if Blaze was a man-eater, or just a mom bear with cubs defending her turf.
And there was one other thing...
Quote:
Only a few years ago, he spared another mother grizzly in Yellowstone just as those advocating for Blaze were demanding he do last week. In 2011, a sow with cubs, known to researchers as the Wapiti grizzly, killed a hiker named Brian Matayoshi. Upon encountering the bears, Matayoshi and his wife had made the unfortunate decision to run, inciting the grizzly to charge in pursuit and attack. While his wife looked on in horror, Matayoshi died. But the sow did not eat him. Since the bear appeared to have acted in a manner typical of a sow accompanied by cubs, Wenk made the decision to let the Wapiti grizzly and its offspring live.
But two months later along a trail in Yellowstone's Hayden Valley, eight miles away, a lone hiker named John Wallace was killed and his body partially consumed. DNA evidence demonstrated conclusively that the Wapiti grizzly and one of her cubs had been present at both encounters. More than half a dozen different grizzlies fed on Wallace.

Wenk came under enormous public criticism from those who claimed he'd favored the lives of bears over public safety, and he nearly lost his job.
That may have swayed his decision.
link

A bigger question than Blaze, Nat Geo wrote in August...
Quote:
The incident comes at a pivotal moment in bear-human relations in the region. Later this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to formally announce its intent to take the Greater Yellowstone grizzly population off the federal list of threatened species and hand custodial management of bears over to Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

Those states also are expected to announce their intention to recommence trophy sport hunting of grizzlies, which had been suspended in 1974, shortly before declining numbers put the population in management triage.
Restoration of grizzlies in Greater Yellowstone region is considered one of the greatest feats in American conservation history. During the early 1980s, grizzly numbers had dipped to fewer than 200, and they continued to fall. Aggressive management action over decades focused on keeping bears out of trash, reducing deaths caused by humans, and doing everything possible to keep female bears of reproductive age with cubs alive. Those actions yielded a population that today is estimated to be between 700 and 1,000 grizzlies.
I'm kinda scared to look up what was decided.
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