Is it just me, or have there been a lot of stories about bear attacks in the region, mostly involving grizzly bears?

There are a lot of grizzlies in the region, which the Wyoming Game and Fish Department has repeatedly confirmed and which Gov. Mark Gordon has noted many times in working on ways to get the big bruins off of the Endangered Species list.

They should be under state management, as they briefly were in 2018 until a Montana judge ruled to return them to the Endangered Species Act. I know that understandably many around here have soured on the ESA because of this, but I’d argue another side. People who think the ESA is a vital program to save species should be the first to want grizzlies off the list, as an example of just how well the program works.

There’s a billboard in Cody right now that says just that, that grizzly bears are an ESA success story, which is why they should no longer be on the list.

I know there are some out there, although I don’t think too many in the region, who don’t trust the state to manage the bears, but in truth the state has been doing the bulk of managing already, and grizzly populations in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are full to bursting.

Wyoming Game and Fish reports, conservatively, well over 1,000 grizzlies in the GYE.

And, clearly, they’re not staying there, as is evidenced by the fact that seeing them come down from Heart Mountain in the fall to fields of alfalfa (and saunter up the Shoshone River near Powell) is a yearly occurrence.

Our columnist Lauren Lejeune made a similar point recently via interviews with two people who are regularly in grizzly territory. Neither said they want grizzly bears to go away — far from it. They, like most everyone around here, simply want them managed, which would include a hunting season, as is done with black bears and many other species that are still thriving in the state.

Game and Fish has already shown it can manage those other species well — wolves have not only not gone extinct since removed from the ESA, they’ve ranged as far as Colorado — so there’s no reason grizzlies wouldn’t have the same outcome.

It’s time to treat grizzlies as the ESA success story they are.