Urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to Protect Wildlife and Wilderness on the Kenai Refuge!

The Trump administration is proposing new regulations to open the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Alaska to brown bear baiting, to eliminate federal restrictions on trapping, and to expand snowmobiling, mountain biking, and ATV use in a significant part of the Refuge. The proposed changes make a mockery of the area’s importance as a refuge for wildlife.

Your comments to protect the Refuge and its wildlife are needed by August 10, so please speak up today!

The 1.9 million-acre Kenai National Wildlife Refuge is the most visited national wildlife refuge in Alaska, and includes the 1.3 million-acre Kenai Wilderness, a great diversity of wildlife, stunning scenery, and world-renowned salmon runs. 

The new rule would allow the cruel and unethical practice of allowing hunters to shoot and kill brown bears over piles of bait. The Refuge has a longstanding prohibition on baiting brown bears because it’s in direct conflict with the refuge’s purpose, which is to conserve wildlife in its natural diversity, including maintaining natural predator-prey relationships. The Kenai peninsula brown bears are an especially vulnerable population due to their isolation from mainland populations, low reproduction rates, and the alarming rate of brown bear killing that occurs on adjacent state and private lands. Zero bear baiting of any kind should occur on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

Alaska has a long history of unapologetic predator extermination efforts which are entirely inconsistent with refuge purposes and have no place on national wildlife refuge lands and in Wilderness, yet this rule would align federal policies with state efforts to significantly depress predator populations.

If baiting bears wasn’t bad enough, the proposed rule would open more of the refuge to trapping with fewer restrictions, which would indiscriminately kill more wildlife, reduce the abundance and diversity of wildlife, and cause untold suffering for animals that die slowly for days in a trap. Rather than weakening trapping regulations, trapping should be altogether banned in the Refuge. 

Finally, the new rule would further stress wildlife by allowing more access for snowmobiles, bicycles, and ATVs in non-wilderness portions of the Refuge. The rule would also allow hunters to use game carts for the first time. Game carts make it easier for hunters to haul animals they’ve killed back to the car, which effectively encourages more hunters to venture further into the Refuge. 

All told, every aspect of the new rule would make the Kenai less of a refuge for wildlife and more of a playground for hunters, snowmobilers, bikers, and ATV riders. Wildlife should come first, with recreation limited so as to lessen human impact on the land and its inhabitants. What is the purpose of a refuge if wildlife finds no refuge there?

Please urge the Fish and Wildlife Service to reject the proposed new rule and instead administer the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge for the conservation purposes for which it was established.