14 DAY TRIAL // This past Wednesday, a panel of wildlife officials in the United States said that there were enough grizzly bears in the Yellowstone region of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming for the species to no longer need legal protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Thus, wildlife officials have asked that the US Fish and Wildlife Service considers taking Yellowstone's grizzly bears off the endangered species list.
Should the species be left without federal protection, people might be given permission to occasionally hunt these animals, The Guardian explains.
Granted, hunting would be very limited, yet conservationists fear that such activities would cause Yellowstone's grizzly population to once again plummet.
An online petition on Care2 is asking that the US Fish and Wildlife Service do not leave the bears without the legal protection that they benefit from under the Endangered Species Act.
The petition was started by Animal Advocates, and is addressed to Secretary Sally Jewell of the Department of the Interior.
“The United States Fish and Wildlife Service plans to draft a rule to delist the grizzly bear from the federal Endangered Species Act, and turn management over to the state of Montana,” it reads.
Furthermore, “The plan doesn’t specifically discuss hunting grizzlies, but it has already been suggested that Montana state officials could add that as a tool for controlling bear numbers., which seems contrary to ‘recovery.’”
The conservationists who started the petition say that, presently, both grizzly bears and other animals living in Montana are threatened by logging and mining activities carried out in the region.
Should the Keystone XL Pipeline be given the green light, the species will already have too much on its plate to also be able to handle being hunted.
“This is absolutely the wrong time to delist grizzly bears in Montana from federal protections as their recovery is not yet complete, although it is better than when they were first listed as endangered 37 years ago,” the conservationists say.
It is estimated that, for the time being, around 700 grizzly bears live in Yellowstone. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to decide whether or not the species should be taken off the endangered species list by mid-2014.