Dear editor:

In response to Chuck Neal’s March 2, 2026 in the Cody Enterprise letter to the editor:

I feel he doesn’t have a clue and that his attitude, as it is of many is, intentionally or not, as a result,  hell bent on destroying not only our heritage, but our sovereignty and ecosystem, also.

A bit of history:

The Shoshone National Forest was set aside by proclamation of President Benjamin Harrison, as the YNP Timberland Reserve on March 30, 1891 — later the Shoshone National Forest.

Furthermore, the late Ted Ogston was chosen as the first man on predator control in YNP after World War I. He killed buffalo to use in grizzly, wolf and coyote control. Ted killed 41 grizzlies with 43 shots from a .250-3000 Savage rifle.

Later the YNP rangers, over many years, killed over 700 grizzlies. Some 80-plus were dynamited while in the Old Faithful dump, and bulldozed over. This was witnessed by Don Newhart. And the killing continued there until the mid-1980s. Despite that fact that the grizzlies were listed as endangered in 1975.

After three years of no hunting pressure, they were becoming so troublesome that the then Wyoming Game and Fish director, Earl Thomas, met with the Idaho and Montana departments in Boise, Idaho with United States Fish and Wildlife, hoping to get put in place licenses to kill problem grizzlies. It would have not only taken care of problem bears, it would have generated income for the departments. I was on the plane sitting next to Earl when he was headed to Boise, and he told me all of the reasons and hopes for that meeting. Sadly, it failed to go through.

The USFWS and the WY G&F have, over 50 years since the bears were listed as endangered, killed over 2,000 of these “endangered” species, and Idaho and Montana, likewise, have killed many, many. Yet their numbers are growing and growing, and are way over the objective set to re-list them. If that number has not eradicated them, hunting surely will not, either. It will be controlled to the n-th degree.

Yet we have this horrific problem, created by environmentalist such as Chuck and others, who like to blame hunters on the reason grizzlies can’t be delisted, and work to stop all scientifically based data that says they should be delisted and managed by hunting. 

The atrocity is that all of this is not science based on keeping the grizzlies listed but an attack on our heritage and on private property rights. They appear to not really care about the grizzlies as much as stopping hunting, which provides great, healthy food, and is a way of life and a successful management tool. Nor do they appear to care, in this instance or in talking about wolves, of the large number of ungulates killed by such large predator populations, to the point that many herds are failing to sustain viable recruitment numbers.

The “cry” we often hear is that there needs to be as many predators here now as there was before settlements. Well, if that is the case, it is a thinly veiled innuendo that all of us [well, perhaps not “them”], need to let the wildlife reclaim the West, so millions upon millions of prey animals can repopulate the area, so the growing predator population has something to eat. It is a utopian fantasy land idea.

The major killing of  so many grizzlies in YNP was wrong, but we’ve got those like Chuck Neal that want to “over-correct” at the expense of our other wildlife and our heritages that include managing wildlife by hunting. This kills more elk, moose, deer and bighorn sheep to the point it is an ecological disaster.

Sincerely,

Randy Selby

Wapiti