Program to Save Grizzlies Comes Under Attack : Writer Claims Rangers Destroy Yellowstone Bears; Park Service Denies Charge

Weighing up to 800 pounds and stretching up to 8 feet tall, grizzly bears got more than most when protection was handed out. In the wild, grizzlies fear no other animal, and in the human world their survival is guarded by law.

But today, as the great bears slumber through the winter, debate has flared anew whether a 17-year campaign to save the grizzlies and increase their numbers is working.

When the effort began in 1968, the grizzly population was flourishing in Canada but had dwindled in the lower 48 states. Just a few hundred remained of the thousands that had roamed the American West 150 years ago.

Most of the survivors were clustered in and around two Western national parks--Glacier in northern Montana and Yellowstone, which straddles Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

Because few other animals are as evocative of the West as the mammoth, silver-tipped grizzly, people became concerned when they learned the grizzly was in trouble. The question now is whether the effort to save the bears has helped or hurt them.

Park Service Accused

In the January issue of Outside magazine, Alston Chase of Livingstone, Mont., accuses the National Park Service of systematically destroying the grizzlies of Yellowstone National Park through the management program adopted in 1968.

His 16,000 words are two chapters from “Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park,” a book to be published in April.

Two years ago, Chase--former chairman of the philosophy department at Macalester College in Minnesota and holder of degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Princeton--made environmental headlines with similar charges in Atlantic Monthly.

“The official and conventional wisdom is that the grizzly is declining because of development around the park and because of increased visitation into the park,” Chase said in a telephone interview from his Montana home. “I’m suggesting something very different. Today, the biggest killer of grizzlies is management.”

To back his charge, Chase cites the deaths of 325 grizzlies in and around Yellowstone since 1968. He says too many of those deaths were at the hands of rangers--by shooting when a bear invaded a campsite, by overtranquilizing and by park management insistence that dumps be closed and human garbage eliminated from the grizzly’s diet.

Grizzly a High Priority

These are stiff allegations, especially since William Penn Mott said saving the grizzly was a major priority almost as soon as he took over as National Park Service chief last summer.

Galen Buterbaugh, regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver and until a few weeks ago chairman of the 2-year-old federal-state Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, disagrees with Chase.

“We’ve reduced the mortality on the bears,” Buterbaugh said. “I would say they’re holding their own. At this point in time, that’s about as optimistic as we can be.”

The interagency committee now officially estimates 185 to 225 grizzlies roam Yellowstone, down from 500 in 1968. Near Glacier National Park in northern Montana, the grizzly population’s steady growth prompted the beginning of a state-sanctioned hunting season in 1974.

Yellowstone Supt. Bob Barbee was blunt in responding to Chase’s charges.

‘Liberties With Data’

“We believe (Chase) has taken some liberties with the data,” Barbee said on a recent visit to Denver. “He does a great deal of homework on the subject, but he doesn’t necessarily draw the right conclusions.

“We’re going to have to go back and respond to arguments we thought we had laid to rest.”

Chase begins his January article with a poignant story. In 1984, he writes, Yellowstone rangers watched for some days as a grizzly sow and three cubs, trapped by a spring thaw on an island in Yellowstone Lake, struggled to find food. Chase recounts a National Park Service decision to let the “situation develop naturally.”

“That’s simply a lie,” Barbee said. “As soon as we found out those bears were on that island . . . we moved as fast as we humanly, possibly could.”

When park officials moved the emaciated bears to shore, the smallest of the cubs died.

In another passage, seeking numbers to support his assertion the grizzly population had dropped, Chase quotes a source as saying that Dr. Richard Knight, a Park Service employee who headed the pre-committee Grizzly Bear Study Team, had told the source that, in five years, he had been able to find only 46 grizzlies.

Disputes Quote

“The point is that Dr. Knight said he’d only trapped 46 bears,” Barbee countered, explaining that is much more difficult than merely sighting them.

Chase also deplores the recent move toward behavior modification. Using non-lethal weapons such as rubber bullets, electric shocks and repellents to teach bears to fear humans is, Chase asserts, “tormenting them.”

The theory behind such conditioning holds that the fewer bear-human confrontations there are, the better it is for the bears.

“Usually, if there’s a conflict,” Buterbaugh said, “the bear loses.”

Chase believes the bears of Yellowstone started losing when rangers closed the garbage dumps where, for decades, the bears had feasted freely on human discards. Bleachers once ringed the dump areas to give the public the best possible views of the bears.

Today, the Park Service believes differently.

Sightings in Wild

“If people see a bear in Yellowstone, we want them to see them in the wild, in a natural state--not with their hind ends sticking out of a garbage can,” Barbee explained.

But Chase argues that man has already changed too much of the grizzlies’ environment to restore any semblance of its primeval state.

“The whole idea of bears eating crusts and breaking catsup bottles is offensive--and understandably so--to the average American,” said Chase. But, he added, the Yellowstone area “lacks a number of animals and the huge runs of spawning trout and salmon that it once had. It lacks a lot of vegetation because of (recent) fire-prevention policies.

“People assume that you can leave it alone (now) and animals will do fine. They don’t.”