The Fight Over Alaska's Hunting Rules Runs Deeper Than Using ...

Some hunters in Alaska use bacon grease or doughnuts to bait bears.

Some use headlamps to find and shoot bears in their dens.

Some kill swimming caribou from motorboats.

These facts are undisputed.

But whether such rare, unconventional methods should be used — and who can tell Alaskans how they kill the animals they eat — is an entirely different matter.

A years-old conflict has pitted the state against the feds, conservationists against preservationists, and people who feed their families by stalking game in the wilderness against those who see certain types of hunting as inhumane.

The tactics that have attracted the most outrage — the bacon, the spotlights, the motorboats — aren’t widely practiced. But they’ve become battle lines in a power struggle between Washington and a rural state with a deep tradition of independence and self-determination. Now the Trump administration is seeking to end the fight by undoing rules that restricted the controversial methods on federal land. It’s a move that has divided local hunters, though many see it as proper deference to local sovereignty.

“Bureaucrats and anti-hunting influences should not determine what’s ethical in Alaska,” said Bruce Dale, director of the state Division of Wildlife Conservation. “In these populist times, it’s hard for people to understand different cultures and traditions. I think people should step back and try to understand.”

‘A totally different world’

Alaskans are used to being seen as oddities by people in the Lower 48.

“It’s a totally different world up here,” said Tyler Freel, 32, a writer for Outdoor Life magazine who hunts — and eats — just about any animal he’s allowed to, including moose, caribou, sheep and bears. “Stuff gets really easily misconstrued.”

Freel, who lives on the outskirts of Fairbanks, baits bears, a highly regulated technique that involves leaving food in a secluded spot in a forest and waiting for a bear to check it out. It is banned in many states but has been used for generations in Alaska, where it remains controversial. Opponents, including some hunters, say it violates standards of “fair chase” — and risks conditioning bears to food associated with humans, which could make them more likely to attack.

"Most of the people who are against hunting of bears and wolves have never seen one in their life."

But proponents say baiting allows them to choose only older, bigger male bears and makes it easier to kill quickly and with less suffering. Baiting also makes it possible to hunt in heavily forested areas where stalking a bear is all but impossible. Even then, it can take weeks or months.

Freel hunts bears on state land, not the federal preserves where the state and federal governments share responsibility. So the dispute over acceptable hunting methods doesn’t directly affect him. But it bothers him nonetheless.

“All of us view it as an encroachment on our livelihoods,” Freel said. “Most of the people who are against hunting of bears and wolves have never seen one in their life, and paint us as bloodthirsty killers, and that’s not the case at all. Neither the state or the people who live here want to see them wiped out.”

Freel often baits with dog food, which is more commonly used and simpler than bacon or doughnuts. He says he doesn’t know many people who use them. For that matter, he says, he doesn’t know anyone who “spotlights” bear dens or shoots swimming caribou from a boat. Those methods are typically used by select groups of Alaska natives whose hunting traditions have been maintained over centuries, while evolving with technology.

Federal rules have always been more lenient for Alaska natives and residents who live far from urban areas; they are eligible to obtain permission to hunt under “federal subsistence regulations” that provide limited exceptions to the disputed rules. Among the rest of the hunters on Alaska’s federal preserves, few use the banned techniques.

“You’d be hard pressed to find these methods going on in the preserves,” said Rod Arno, executive director of the Alaska Outdoor Council, an association of outdoor clubs. “It’s miniscule.”

But the feds decided to crack down during the Obama administration because they said the state was allowing activities that violated its duty to safeguard the jointly managed parks.

‘These practices are quite extreme’

This feud stems from a 1980 law, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, that set aside millions of acres of federally owned lands to let Alaskans maintain their frontier lifestyle and economy. The arrangement — allowing both sport and subsistence hunting on federal “preserves” — is unique to Alaska. And it is the source of constant friction, because the two partners have different missions. The National Park Service is charged with protecting wildlife populations — including that of predators like bears and wolves — in "an unaltered natural ecosystem." Alaska’s Board of Game, meanwhile, is charged with assuring large populations of huntable prey like caribou and moose.

That unsteady alliance reached a turning point in 2015, after the state eased some rules, allowing hunters’ to use lights in bear dens, bait grizzlies with human food and hunt wolves in the spring and summer, when they are raising their young. The park service responded by prohibiting those methods and adding prohibitions on other techniques, such as hunting caribou by boat, which the state allowed in small areas.

"Allowing the killing of bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens is barbaric and inhumane."

Animal rights and preservation groups applauded the restrictions, saying they would help keep federal land intact for people — including most Alaskans, they said — who want to enjoy undisturbed habitats. They have also criticized the disputed hunting methods as cruel to animals.

“Allowing the killing of bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens is barbaric and inhumane,” Jamie Rappaport Clark, CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement.

But the new rules prompted an uproar among Alaska hunters and regulators, who say they have the right to manage hunting the way they see fit.

The state said that its expanded regulations were meant to allow for more hunting, and that the long-term impact on the ecosystem was negligible. Alaska sued the park service, accusing it of violating the 1980 agreement.

Now, under President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke — an avid hunter who has made a priority of expanding hunting rights on federal lands — the park service is ready to reverse itself. Last month, the park service proposed rescinding its 2015 prohibitions. That put park service staffers in the awkward position of backing down from rules they’d recently defended. They phrased the reversal as an effort to cooperate better with state regulators according to the priorities of their new leadership in Washington.

“NPS has determined that these practices previously prohibited by the 2015 regulation can be allowed consistent with the goal of more closely aligning its rules with those of the State,” National Park Service spokesman Peter Christian said in a statement.