Deep in southwest Alaska, a caribou herd that once roared across the tundra at nearly 200,000 strong has shrunk to barely 13,000 animals. Villages that depended on those animals for meat have gone years without a legal hunt. State wildlife officials say bears—and to a lesser degree wolves—are eating too many newborn calves, and they’ve launched an aggressive plan: state employees in helicopters track down brown and black bears over an area the size of Indiana and shoot them on sight.
On Monday, two conservation groups fired back in court.
The Alaska Wildlife Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity, represented by the public-interest law firm Trustees for Alaska, filed a 44-page lawsuit in Anchorage Superior Court. They want the whole program shut down—again.
This isn’t the first round. A judge already threw out an earlier version of the same plan last March because the state couldn’t show it had any solid numbers on how many bears actually live in the region or whether the population could take the hit. Undeterred, the Alaska Board of Game came right back in July with a new five-year authorization that runs through 2028. Critics say it’s basically the same plan with the serial numbers filed off.
What’s actually happening on the ground is hard to overstate. Court filings say that in May 2023 state shooters working a 1,200-square-mile core zone around the Mulchatna herd’s traditional calving grounds killed “every single brown and black bear it found.” Over the 2023 and 2024 seasons combined, the tally reached 180 bears—mostly grizzlies. There’s no hard cap on the body count, no requirement to keep counting bears afterward, and no public reporting until it’s already done.
State officials insist they’re being careful. Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang told reporters after the July vote, “We were trying to rebuild the caribou herd, but we’re not going to jeopardize long-term sustainability of bears in so doing.” He pointed to an aerial survey last fall that found the best calf-to-cow ratio in the western part of the herd since 1999 and called it proof the program is working.
Conservationists aren’t buying it.
Nicole Schmitt, executive director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, said the rules are written to let the department “kill as many bears as possible first, then ask questions later.” She noted that parts of the kill zone sit just 30 miles from the bear-viewing mecca of Katmai National Park and even closer to Lake Clark National Park and several federal wildlife refuges. Bears don’t read boundary signs; a grizzly sow raising cubs this year on state land could easily wander into a national park next spring and be one of the most photographed animals on Earth.
The legal argument goes deeper than hurt feelings about bears. The Alaska Constitution says fish and wildlife must be managed on the “sustained yield” principle—meaning you can’t hammer one species indefinitely to boost another. The lawsuit claims the Board of Game handed the Department of Fish and Game “a blank check to destroy bears across an entire region with impunity,” in the words of Trustees for Alaska staff attorney Michelle Sinnott.
This fight has been simmering for years. The Mulchatna herd was one of the state’s great success stories in the 1990s—plenty of animals, plenty of tags, plenty of meat going into smokehouses from Dillingham to Bethel to Lime Village. Then the crash came. By 2019 the herd was down to roughly 13,000 caribou, and the state closed even subsistence hunting in 2021. People started asking questions.
The Department of Fish and Game says disease and poor nutrition aren’t the main culprits this time. Predation is. Bears and wolves hang around the calving grounds in May and June and pick off newborns that can barely stand. Reducing predator numbers, the thinking goes, gives more calves a chance to make it to fall.
Hunters and rural residents are split. Some desperately want caribou back on the table and are willing to see a few years of hard medicine on bears. Others worry that once you start shooting grizzlies from helicopters, it’s a tough habit to break—and the next target could be wolves, or something else.
For now, the helicopters are still legal. The new lawsuit asks for an immediate injunction to ground them while the case works its way through court. A similar emergency version of the program was briefly allowed last year; state crews killed 11 more bears before another judge pulled the plug.
Anyone who has spent time in Alaska knows the debate over predator control never stays calm for long. It pits neighbor against neighbor, village against village, and—more and more—Anchorage conference rooms against people who actually live out there.
One thing both sides agree on: everybody wants a healthy Mulchatna herd again. The fight is over whether turning the sky into a shooting gallery for bears is the way to get it, or whether the state is breaking its own constitution to chase a quick fix.
The judge’s next move will tell us which side gets to keep flying.
