Can We Rethink This?

Wickersham's Conscience

Grizzly Bear, Denali National Park

The Alaska Board of Game never met a proposal to kill a predator that it didn’t like. Why, it likes those proposals so much that it doesn’t matter what the public thinks, or what the science says. If it’s an opportunity to kill a wolf or a bear, the answer is, “Hell, yes,” and no further answers will even be considered.

The idea that you can increase the population of ungulates by decreasing the population of predators has always been scientifically suspect. Any biologist will tell you it is the supply of food, not predation, that typically sets the upper limit on a population. After all, predator and prey have been around for millennia, at least since the end of the last ice age. They’ve reached a point of evolutionary stability. It might be cyclical, like snowshoe hares and lynx, but in longer terms, it’s…

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