Inside the Trump Administration's Move to Reopen Alaska's National Preserves to Bear Baiting
A sprawling, decade-long regulatory war over one of hunting's most disputed practices just reached its latest flashpoint. The Trump administration has finalized a rule that overturns bans imposed by both the Obama and Biden administrations, reopening Alaska's national preserves to bear baiting by sport hunters. The decision rekindles a fight that has played out across four presidencies, multiple federal courtrooms, and millions of acres of some of the most remote wilderness on the planet — and it's not going quietly.
What Bear Baiting Actually Is — and Why It Matters
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game allows hunters to use bait to hunt bears in certain places and at certain times of the year. Baiting is the practice of setting up stations with food to attract bears so they can be targeted for hunting. In practice, that means a hunter establishes a feeding site in the woods, loads it with attractants, and waits for a bear to come within range. The rule gives trophy hunters the legal authority to lure black and brown bears with human food, including donuts, bacon grease and other bait — some of which are toxic and deadly to wildlife — before shooting them at close range.
To its proponents, this is no different from the deer stand and corn pile system that millions of American hunters use every fall across the whitetail belt. The argument is straightforward: bears are intelligent, dangerous, and elusive animals in dense Alaskan terrain, and baiting is a legitimate technique that has been refined and regulated by the state for years. Supporters say that it is a standard hunting method that, as regulated by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, is conducted in a controlled and careful way, affecting only a few animals. Alaska's bear baiting rules already include time and location restrictions — it isn't a free-for-all.
To opponents, though, the practice occupies an entirely different moral and ecological category. Critics say it is unethical and dangerous to wildlife and people. The concerns range from the conditioning of wild bears to associate human scent and human food with reward — a well-documented pathway to dangerous human-wildlife conflict — to the question of whether national preserves, with their unique mission to protect natural resources for all visitors, are the right place for the practice at all.
The Legal and Regulatory Architecture Behind the Fight
ANILCA: The 1980 Law at the Center of Everything
Any serious examination of this debate starts with the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, known as ANILCA, signed into law in 1980. Congress explicitly authorized hunting and trapping in national preserves when it passed ANILCA in 1980. That authorization distinguished Alaska's national preserves from national parks, which are closed to hunting, and it set the stage for 45 years of jurisdictional tension between the federal government and the state of Alaska over who actually controls the terms of the hunt. ANILCA allows harvest of wildlife in national preserves in Alaska for subsistence purposes by local rural residents under federal regulations, and also allows harvest of wildlife for sport purposes by any individual under laws of the state of Alaska that do not conflict with federal laws.
The phrase "do not conflict with federal laws" has proven to be a legal fault line. Alaska and its allies in the hunting community have long argued that ANILCA was designed to preserve state primacy over wildlife management, while federal agencies and courts have periodically asserted broad preemptive authority. In a 2022 Ninth Circuit ruling, the court held that ANILCA preserves the federal government's authority over Alaska's public lands — a conclusion that cut directly against the state's position and has fueled calls for legislative relief ever since.
Subsistence vs. Sport: A Critical Distinction
One aspect of this debate that often gets lost in the political noise is the distinction between subsistence and sport hunting. The new rule's bear-baiting allowance in national preserves applies only to sport hunting. Subsistence hunting in federal land units is managed by the federal government, and bear baiting has been allowed for subsistence hunters. That distinction is significant: rural Alaskans who depend on wild game for food were never caught up in the bear baiting controversy in the same way that sport and trophy hunters were. The entire decade-long battle has revolved specifically around whether outside sport hunters — including those affiliated with trophy hunting organizations — can access national preserve lands using baiting methods.
A Decade of Reversals: The Regulatory Timeline
The Obama Era Ban, 2015
In 2015, the Obama administration issued a rule barring bear baiting and other controversial hunting practices like killing cubs in dens, using dogs to hunt bears and shooting swimming caribou, all practices that were allowed on state land. The rule was framed as a necessary corrective: national preserves are part of the National Park System, and the Park Service determined that practices normalized on state lands weren't automatically appropriate inside federal units with their own conservation mandates. Because bait often includes dog food and human food, including items like bacon grease and pancake syrup, which are not a natural component of animal diets, the NPS was concerned that baiting could lead to bears and other animals associating these foods with people, which would create a variety of risks to people, bears, and property.
Trump's First Term: The 2020 Rollback and the Courts
Trump's first administration rescinded the bear baiting ban in 2020. But the reversal ran into immediate legal trouble. The new rule stems from a 2020 lawsuit that challenged the Trump administration change. That Trump-era policy never went into effect; U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that it violated National Park Service laws and policies, and she ordered the agency to reconsider it. Humane World for Animals and its allies successfully challenged the rollback in federal court twice over the next two years.
A parallel court battle was unfolding on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, where in 2020, conservation groups, including the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, notched a victory when a federal court struck down the first Trump administration's plan to allow baiting of brown bears within the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. The state and Safari Club International attempted to reverse that ruling, but the appeal was rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined the state and Safari Club's request to take up the case.
Biden's Restoration, 2024
The Biden administration in 2024 resurrected part of the Obama administration's restrictions, specifically focusing on the bear baiting ban. The rule was narrower than the original 2015 Obama-era regulation — the Park Service did not restore all of the earlier prohibitions — but it drew a firm line on bear baiting specifically. The National Park Service under President Biden issued a proposed rule change noting that bear baiting increases the "potential for significant human injury or even death."
Trump's Second Term: The Final Rule, 2026
Sport hunters will be able to bait bears in Alaska national preserves under a final rule the Trump administration announced. The rule, proposed in March, overturns bans by the Biden and Obama administrations of the practice within National Park Service units. This time, the administration did not stop at simply reversing Biden's 2024 rule. The rule also carries out Trump's January 20, 2025 executive order on Alaska, which directed the Interior Department to rescind the 2024 bear baiting ban and restore the regulations Trump adopted during his first term. The Park Service says it went "further" than the order required and also removed changes made in 2015 and 2017 under President Obama.
The Administration's Argument: State Authority and Alaska's Unique Circumstances
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been the public face of the administration's rationale. Burgum stated that for more than three decades, Alaska's national parks and preserves were managed under a framework that recognized Alaska's unique circumstances, respected the state's role in managing fish and wildlife, protected subsistence uses and conserved remarkable lands and resources. "This final rule restores that commonsense framework and gives Alaskans a stronger voice in decisions affecting the lands, wildlife and traditions they know best, while ensuring the National Park Service continues to protect park resources for future generations."
The argument is rooted in a broader philosophy of federalism that resonates with a substantial portion of the American hunting community: that wildlife management expertise lives at the state level, and that federal overreach in Alaska has displaced a functioning system that worked for three decades. Vincent-Lang said, "The change represents a necessary return to the fish and wildlife management framework established by the Alaska Constitution and reaffirmed in ANILCA, which had served Alaska for three decades." Vincent-Lang also said it was "refreshing to see a federal agency recognize the State's role as the primary manager of fish and wildlife within its borders."
The rule would also restore the public notice and consultation procedures for closures that existed before the Obama-era changes, and strip out provisions that gave the federal government discretionary authority to override Alaska Fish and Game. In other words, the administration is not just reopening bear baiting — it is restructuring the procedural framework that governs all sport hunting in Alaska's national preserves, tilting it back toward Juneau and away from Washington.
The Opposition: Safety, Science, and Ethics
What the Research Shows
The strongest arguments against the rule are grounded in the behavior of bears themselves. A 2024 peer-reviewed study by Park Service and outside biologists found that bears defending bait sites pose a "moderate to high" risk of injuring or killing park visitors. When the Biden administration proposed its rule in 2023, the Park Service itself warned that bear baiting increases the "potential for significant human injury or even death."
The Trump administration's final rule pushes back against that science directly. The rule says the study cited in the 2024 ban applies only to campgrounds and other crowded areas, not remote bait stations. It dismisses a survey of bear biologists as addressing "theoretical risks" and calls it "speculation without context or data." Critics say that characterization ignores the government's own experts. The mechanism of concern isn't just proximity to an active bait station — it's conditioning, the process by which bears learn to seek out human food and associate human presence with reward, a behavioral change that persists long after any bait station is removed.
Kitty Block, president and CEO of Humane World for Animals, argued: "It doesn't just put bears at risk, it teaches them to associate people with food, increasing the likelihood of dangerous encounters with hikers, campers and visitors enjoying Alaska's public lands."
The Public Comment Record
The Park Service's own public engagement process cut against the rule. The Park Service received 5,172 comments on the proposal, including submissions from groups representing more than 48,000 signatories, and the agency acknowledged that "a large number of comments specifically opposed the use of bait in harvesting bears, sharing ethical concerns and potential risks to wildlife populations and public safety." Beyond the formal comment record, polling data suggests public sentiment in Alaska itself is skeptical: a 2023 poll found that 75% of Alaskans oppose bear baiting.
Conservation Groups Flag Conflicts of Interest
Critics have also questioned the process by which the rule came to be, pointing to the outsized influence of organized trophy hunting groups. The Park Service considered a May 2025 letter from Safari Club International, one of the country's biggest trophy hunting groups, along with an October 2025 petition from the Alaska Outdoor Council, both of which asked the agency to roll back protections dating to 2015.
Nicole Schmitt, executive director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, said: "The rule change we see today was championed by Safari Club International, who just last month petitioned the Department of Interior to dismantle the power and local representation on the Federal Subsistence Board. Now, this same outside group wants to unlock Alaska's National Preserves for expansive sport hunting, opening cherished preserves like Denali to bear baiting."
What Lands Are Actually Affected?
Sport hunting is permitted in the more than 22 million acres of national preserves in Alaska. These are not peripheral or marginal lands. Alaska's national preserves include areas like Wrangell-St. Elias, Denali, and Katmai — landscapes that define the American wilderness imagination, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors per year for wildlife viewing, hiking, fishing, and photography. The policy change affects how all sport hunters can pursue bears within these units, meaning the ecological and safety implications extend across terrain that is simultaneously remote and heavily trafficked by non-hunting visitors.
For more than 20 years, Alaska's Board of Game has liberalized hunting methods that target bears and wolves, including baiting brown bears, killing bear cubs or sows with cubs, and killing wolves or coyotes, including pups, during the denning season. The new federal rule does not necessarily endorse all of those practices within preserves — the bear baiting change is the central element — but it does reestablish state regulations as the operative framework, which means the outer limits of what's permitted will be defined in Juneau, not Washington.
What Comes Next: Litigation and Precedent
Anyone expecting this to be the final word hasn't been paying attention. The fight over bear baiting has stretched across four administrations, and Humane World for Animals says it is preparing to sue again. "For more than a decade, we've fought, and repeatedly prevailed, in the courts to stop this cruelty," said Kitty Block.
The litigation path is well-worn at this point. The 2020 Trump-era version of the same rule never survived court scrutiny. That Trump-era policy never went into effect; Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that it violated National Park Service laws and policies, and ordered the agency to reconsider it. Whether the 2026 version is sufficiently different in its procedural grounding — particularly given how much further it goes in unwinding Obama-era rules — will be the core legal question in any upcoming challenge. The administration appears to have anticipated that scrutiny by leaning heavily on Trump's January 2025 executive order and by framing the rule as a restoration of a pre-existing framework rather than a novel policy creation.
For the hunting community, the stakes of that litigation are high. A third consecutive court defeat would likely push the entire state-versus-federal jurisdiction question back into the hands of Congress, where ANILCA reform has been an aspirational goal of Alaska's political delegation for years. Beginning in 2015, the U.S. Department of Interior issued three regulations preventing brown bear baiting, overriding state-authorized hunting on park preserves and national wildlife refuges — and Alaska and Safari Club International sued. The pattern of rule, lawsuit, reversal, and counter-lawsuit has been grinding on long enough that both sides have institutional muscle memory for it.
The Bigger Picture: Federal Land Management and Western Sporting Culture
At its core, the bear baiting debate is a proxy for a much larger argument about who controls the West. Federal land management policy in Alaska has always carried outsized symbolic weight for hunters, ranchers, and resource-users across the country, because Alaska represents the most dramatic version of a dynamic that plays out from Montana to Nevada: vast stretches of land that fall under federal jurisdiction, managed by agencies whose priorities don't always align with the people who live and work on or near them.
For the American hunter, the question isn't simply whether bear baiting is a practice he personally endorses. It's whether state wildlife agencies — which are, in most cases, funded almost entirely by hunters through license fees and excise taxes, and which hold genuine expertise in regional game management — should have the authority to set hunting regulations on federal lands within their borders. For most of the years since the passage of that 1980 law, the federal government deferred to state management of sport hunting, which includes allowances for bear baiting at times in certain areas. The argument that this deference was the norm, not the aberration, carries real weight in the sporting community.
The counterargument — that national preserves exist to serve all Americans, not just those who hunt, and that practices which condition bears to human food create risks for hikers, photographers, and casual visitors — is equally grounded. There are roughly 22 million acres of national preserve land in Alaska. The number of bears affected by any given bait station is, by almost every account, small. But the symbolic and legal dimensions of what it means to bait bears inside a unit of the National Park System are enormous, which is precisely why this fight keeps restarting every four years.
The View From the Field
For the hunter who wants to pursue black or brown bears in Alaska's national preserves, the practical implications of the new rule are real and immediate. Bear hunting over bait requires months of preparation — scouting locations, establishing stations, understanding state regulations on bait composition and placement, and coordinating with outfitters who know the specific terrain. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game allows hunters to use bait to hunt bears in certain places and at certain times of the year, meaning this is not a blanket authorization for every acre of every preserve. The state's rules still govern the specifics, and those rules are themselves subject to change through the Alaska Board of Game process.
What the federal rule change does is remove the layer of federal prohibition that had, since 2015, made the state's own allowances irrelevant inside national preserves. A hunter who planned a baited bear hunt in a national preserve under state authorization now has a legal pathway that didn't exist under the Biden-era rule — at least until the courts weigh in again. Given the litigation history, outfitters and hunters would be wise to stay current on the status of any legal challenge before committing significant resources to a preserve-based baited bear hunt.
The terrain itself, meanwhile, remains indifferent to all of it. Somewhere in the spruce and alder of Wrangell-St. Elias or the tundra margins of Denali, brown bears are doing what brown bears do — moving, feeding, preparing for winter. The argument about how, when, and by whom they can be legally hunted will continue in federal courtrooms and comment periods and executive orders for years to come. That much, by now, is as certain as the Alaskan wilderness itself.
