A grizzly bear was captured north of Pinedale on Wednesday and relocated to an area about 5 miles from the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park.
The adult male was targeted after it killed …
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A grizzly bear was captured north of Pinedale on Wednesday and relocated to an area about 5 miles from the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park.
The adult male was targeted after it killed cattle on a U.S. Forest Service grazing allotment north of Pinedale in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the Forest Service decided the bear should be relocated to the Five Mile Drainage within the Shoshone National Forest.
Game and Fish attempts to capture bears when other options are exhausted or unattainable.
“Grizzly bear relocation is a management tool afforded to large carnivore biologists to minimize conflicts between humans and grizzly bears and is critical to the management of the population,” Game and Fish reported in a press release Friday.
Once captured, all circumstances are taken into account when determining if the animal should be relocated or removed (euthanized or moved to a facility out of the ecosystem). Bears deemed an immediate threat to human safety are not released back into the wild.
“When relocation is warranted, the selection of a relocation site is determined taking into consideration the age, sex, and type of conflict the bear was involved in as well as potential human activity in the vicinity of the relocation site,” the Game and Fish said. “This particular site was chosen due to the lack of human presence.”
The department continues to stress the importance of the public’s responsibility in bear management and the importance of keeping all attractants (food items, garbage, horse feed, bird seed, and others) out of the reach of bears. Reducing attractants reduces human-bear conflicts.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there have been 16 grizzly mortalites in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Five of those bears were euthanized following final decisions by Fish and Wildlife, with four of them in Wyoming.