Writer Rachel Nuwer investigates the rollback of a rule banning controversial hunting methods in Alaska's national preserves
On Aug 7, National Geographic published a throgouth article outlining many of Alaska’s wildlife management polices Alaska Wildlife Alliance works everyday to correct. These include shifting the wildlife management paradigm to focus on ecosystem-wide solutions, not simply killing predators to artificially inflate the number of moose, caribou, and other ungulates available for harvest.
Almost none of the success stories Alaska regularly cites in support of its wildlife management practices have been borne out, Miller says. The state, for example, partly attributes a 2 to 4 percent annual increase of one caribou population to its wolf reduction efforts. But in 2017, biologists with Alaska Department of Fish and Game published a peer-reviewed study that found no evidence linking increased caribou to wolf reduction, likely because not enough wolves (834 between 2004 and 2017, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game) were killed to have an effect. The lead author of the paper, Rod Boertje, says the caribou population was already increasing before wolf control started.
- Rachel Nuwer
Read the full article here, Why the U.S. government is allowing bears, wolves to be hunted in their dens
