When Janet Bavilla was a teenager, it wasn’t hard to find caribou. The animals swept across the land, dozens or even hundreds at a time, passing near her village on Alaska’s Bering Sea coast. On family hunts, Bavilla remembers riding her snow machine just a few miles before encountering the herd.
Bavilla, who is Yup’ik, harvested a couple of animals each season — gathering enough meat to eat, share with neighbors and relatives, and freeze for later. She’d dry some to make a popular snack called kinengyak in Yugtun, the local language, and then dip it in seal oil. Or she’d cut frozen hunks into pieces and eat them raw. In all its forms, caribou helped sustain the residents of a region with few grocery stores, hundreds of miles from Alaska’s road system and accessible only by boat or small plane.
But those days have waned. It’s been years since Bavilla, now in her 40s, has put away caribou meat. “I can’t remember the last time I went out,” she said.
The Mulchatna herd that Bavilla grew up hunting, like several other Alaska caribou populations, has thinned dramatically in recent years. It reached its latest peak — some 200,000 animals — in the 1990s, when Bavilla was in high school. But then it plummeted to an estimated low of 12,000 in 2022. Caribou no longer pass by Bavilla’s village, Platinum, in large numbers, and the changing climate — lack of snow, rivers that no longer reliably freeze over — has made accessing the remaining few much harder. “I feel like a big part of our subsistence is missing,” Bavilla said.
To help the Mulchatna herd rebound, state wildlife managers have resorted to drastic measures. In 2021, they prohibited hunting — a move that some local Indigenous leaders and hunters, including Bavilla, say was necessary. Two years later, state employees helicoptered over part of the herd’s calving grounds, shooting bears and wolves from the sky. In just over two weeks, state officials killed nearly 100 bears and a handful of wolves. A year later, they continued the culling.
Altogether, officials have killed almost 200 bears and some 20 wolves over the past three years — all in an attempt to increase the Mulchatna caribou’s survival rates. The campaign is expected to continue over the next few summers.
But it has sparked litigation and intense pushback from wildlife advocates, scientists and former state politicians and regulators, who question its efficacy. Former Gov. Tony Knowles called it a “massacre” of one of the state’s most iconic animals: the grizzly bear, which is commonly known to Alaskans as the brown bear.
These critics, many of them from urban centers hundreds of miles from the caribou grounds, have raised numerous concerns. While some research suggests that predator control, in certain situations, might temporarily help ungulate populations, skeptics say there’s scant evidence that killing bears will actually help the Mulchatna caribou recover. And they worry, too, that it could harm a bear population that’s beloved both in and out of the state.
But state officials insist that targeting bears is worth a try, as one of the only actions they can take directly to help the struggling herd. And they have considerable support from some of the people living closest to the animals, many of whom are Indigenous. A number of Alaska Native organizations, including the statewide Alaska Federation of Natives and one of the largest tribal governments in the region, the Orutsararmiut Native Council in Bethel, have passed resolutions supporting the predator control program.
Their support stems from a desire to boost food security and restore traditional hunting in a region far removed from Alaska’s road system — a place where imported goods are limited and expensive, and many people harvest food directly from the land. In the western portion of the Mulchatna herd’s range, the caribou shortage has coincided with low salmon returns and rising grocery prices, “making it more difficult for residents to feed their families with healthy foods,” the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, a regional tribal health organization, said in a June 2025 resolution backing the state’s efforts.
Not everyone in the region agrees with this approach: Some Alaska Native wildlife experts have criticized the bear killing as a form of cruelty at odds with traditional values, and some subsistence hunters view it as another chapter in a long history of top-down management by settler governments. But many others, including Bavilla, firmly support the program, arguing that early evidence of a rebound in caribou numbers indicates that it’s working.
“I believe the caribou are at a turning point where they just need a little help,” Bavilla said.
THE IDEA TO KILL BEARS to save caribou first became public during a 2022 meeting of the Alaska Board of Game. The board, made up of seven members appointed by the governor, oversees hunting regulations with guidance from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
For years, the agency has supervised the shooting and trapping of wolves on the Mulchatna herd’s calving grounds, aiming to boost survival rates among young caribou. Wolves are prolific consumers of caribou; on average, one wolf can kill 25 a year, one scientist told High Country News. But despite that program, herd numbers still hadn’t recovered.
This worried Stosh Hoffman, an Alaska Native hunter and former commercial fisherman, who was, at the time, the chair of the Game Board. Like many in the region, Hoffman, who lives in the Western Alaska hub town of Bethel, hunted the Mulchatna herd with his family before its precipitous decline.
“I think there’s a lot more we can do to help that herd,” Hoffman said at the meeting. One idea, he suggested, would be to target bears as well as wolves. Like wolves, grizzlies feed on caribou calves, and local hunters had reported an uptick in bears near the herd, though state officials had not formally assessed the population. “Every predator is making a huge impact right now, especially the bears on the calving grounds,” Hoffman said.
This kind of thinking isn’t new; predator control programs, as they’re often euphemized, are common across the country. Despite mixed evidence of their effectiveness, proponents have long argued that killing carnivores is one of the few actions government agencies can take to boost populations of prey species. Before launching the Mulchatna initiative, Fish and Game staff indicated they might encounter, and kill, five to 15 brown bears on the calving grounds. When the killing had finished, the agency reported a much higher number: State field workers had gunned down 94 grizzlies, five black bears and five wolves.
Outrage ensued. An advocacy group, Alaska Wildlife Alliance, and an Anchorage attorney filed lawsuits against the state, arguing there was “no credible scientific basis” for the killing. Opponents wrote strongly worded op-eds in the Anchorage Daily News, describing their “disgust and fury mixed with heartbreak” over the “slaughter.”
“I think there’s a lot more we can do to help that herd.”
“The state’s predator-control program violates Indigenous values and ignores the real drivers of caribou decline: climate change, habitat degradation, disease and nutritional stress,” Michelle Quillin, a Koyukon Athabascan wildlife biologist, wrote in an op-ed last year.
Jeff Stetz, a wildlife biologist, has become one of the program’s more outspoken critics. He worked at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for five years and was coordinating Mulchatna caribou research when the Game Board decided to add bears to the predator control program.
“I was absolutely dumbfounded,” he said. A major concern for Stetz and others was the way the 2022 meeting was handled: Board members introduced the idea of killing bears and then approved it, without any prior notice or opportunity for public comment. A judge later ruled that this violated Alaska’s Constitution.
Jake Fletcher, chair of the Alaska Board of Game, and Stosh Hoffman, the board’s vice chair, discuss predator control at a meeting in Anchorage last July (top left); Doug Vincent-Lang, Alaska Department of Fish and Game commissioner, and Ryan Scott, director of the agency’s Wildlife Conservation Division (top right). Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon; Locals listen during the public comment period at a meeting last March (bottom). Alaska’s News Source
But Stetz was alarmed by more than the fact that the proposal appeared to come out of nowhere. From a scientific standpoint, he said, it was “wildly inappropriate.” Stetz isn’t against predator control on principle, but he felt that in this case, the state hadn’t done enough research. “The scientific foundation for it was absent.”
In their defense, state officials have cited a rise in the Mulchatna herd’s numbers over the past three years: The agency estimated the population to be just over 16,000 last year — a 30% increase since the culling started. Critics say it’s still too early to be certain whether the program has been effective.
The rift offers a window into the complex science and messy politics of caribou conservation — an issue that’s coming into clearer view as herds across the North face new and intensifying threats. Over the last few decades, as the Arctic warmed and industrial development expanded, tundra caribou numbers have fallen by 65%, according to a 2024 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Caribou are notably adaptable and resilient, with remarkable memories and eyes that change color to adjust to the wide spectrum of Arctic light. But as their ecosystem shifts, they face new challenges: During warmer summers, they sometimes struggle to avoid swarms of harassing insects, while in the cooler months, increasing rain on snow can form ice that traps lichen, a dietary staple.
Many of Alaska’s herds have followed this downward trend. But the question of how to stanch the decline has proved vexing to wildlife managers. State and federal wildlife agencies lack the power to reverse global warming, and some of the measures within their control, like prohibiting hunting and killing predators, aren’t always effective and tend to be controversial.
As the Mulchatna herd’s future becomes increasingly precarious, researchers and managers will be tasked not only with collecting new data and trying to figure out what exactly is going on, but also with the possibly more challenging work of navigating an ever-thornier political landscape, in which hunters, Indigenous leaders, regulators, scientists and conservation groups don’t always see eye-to-eye.
AT THE SAME 2022 MEETING where the Board of Game approved the bear killing, two state biologists presented research that cast doubt on the idea that predation was causing the Mulchatna herd’s decline.
Instead, they suggested that, based on preliminary data, two other factors — nutrition and disease — were more likely to be inhibiting the herd’s recovery. The scientists had detected high levels of exposure to Brucella, a bacteria that can cause stillbirths and poor health in calves. They also observed low levels of body fat in lactating females, possibly indicating nutritional deficiencies. Merely getting rid of predators might not help the caribou, the scientists said.
Doug Vincent-Lang, the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, was skeptical. He told the scientists that he was “fundamentally struggling” with the idea that predator control wouldn’t have a role in the herd’s recovery.
“It may not have been the reason for the decline. It may not be the reason for the lack of recovery. But it certainly seems, given where we are with this population, that efforts, basically, to protect calves from predation would go a long way towards helping,” Vincent-Lang said. “It seems like that’s one of the only things that’s in our direct control.”
Vincent-Lang’s perspective may make intuitive sense: Fewer predators ought to mean more calves. But skeptics say that won’t necessarily translate into a stronger herd if the calves that would have been eaten end up dying anyway from disease or malnutrition.
To Jeff Stetz, the 2022 meeting indicated that the state’s wildlife managers were ignoring their own biologists’ research and “literally going in the face of the best available information.”
One challenge officials face is that studies have been slow to explain why population numbers have stayed low. And there’s ample debate about whether the herd’s decline is an emergency requiring urgent intervention, or merely part of a natural cycle. Unlike other herds, which face encroachment on their habitat from industrial oil development and mining operations, the Mulchatna’s range — which is about six times the size of the state of Vermont — is still largely roadless and wild.
Local hunters and elders observed that overgrazing when the population peaked in the 1990s led to a food shortage, causing malnutrition and greater susceptibility to disease and predation. Biologists have echoed this theory, and some say that climate change-related conditions, like winter rainstorms and the expansion of shrubs and trees into caribou-favored tundra, also pose a challenge.
Natural fluctuations in caribou numbers are typically driven by habitat changes and the availability of certain foods, including lichen, said Patrick Walsh, who worked for two decades as a wildlife biologist at Alaska’s Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, which includes important Mulchatna caribou habitat.
But the Department of Fish and Game has yet to do a formal habitat assessment, Walsh said. According to Walsh, that would give biologists a firmer understanding of the possible factors limiting the herd’s growth, including the amount of food and tundra available to the animals. Without that research, it’s tough to make prudent management decisions, Walsh said.
“If habitat is the population driver, then trying to correct it with something that’s not really driving the population, like predation, doesn’t succeed,” he added.
Walsh also questions the population target for the Mulchatna herd — 30,000 to 80,000 caribou — that managers set more than a decade ago. He believes that goal is unrealistically high.
Caribou populations naturally cycle through booms and busts. A few decades before it peaked in the 1990s, the herd was estimated to be about the size that it is today. Walsh views its recent decline largely as a natural “correction” to unsustainable growth. “The fact that numbers have changed a whole lot is what you should expect,” he said.
But Hoffman, the Game Board member from Bethel, said that while the population has always fluctuated, today’s numbers are especially low; there are historical accounts of a boom in the 19th century, when “this country must have been overwhelmed with caribou,” Hoffman said.
Both Hoffman and Bavilla, the hunter in Platinum, said they hope local voices don’t get drowned out by the lawsuits and comment letters from people who live outside the region. “We have a better understanding of our area than folks who don’t live here,” Bavilla said.
Ryan Scott, director of the Wildlife Conservation Division at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says his agency eventually should reassess its targets for the herd. But he told High Country News that he thinks it would be “extremely arbitrary” to do that while officials are still actively working to boost numbers. He expects the Board of Game to discuss its objectives in 2028, when the predator control program expires.
A state judge ruled last year that the culling was unconstitutional because the Game Board had adopted it without sufficient public notice and had not ensured that it could be done without harming bear populations. State officials quickly issued an emergency order to reauthorize the program, and the killing continued, albeit only briefly. Fish and Game employees shot 11 bears over a weekend in May 2025, before a second state judge found them in violation of the earlier court ruling and ordered them to stop.
Seeking to correct the legal flaws, the Board of Game held a special meeting in July and once again approved the culling. There, a biologist with the Department of Fish and Game presented new research that appeared to provide a stronger basis for predator control.
That researcher, Kristin Denryter, said more recent data on body conditions, pregnancy rates and calf mortality suggest nutrition and disease have not been major obstacles to the herd’s growth, and that predation was a more likely culprit. “I can’t think of anything else that would explain it,” she said in an interview. She and her colleagues have identified predation as the primary cause of calf and adult female mortality in the herd, and their research indicates that bears are killing calves that otherwise would survive, she said.
Still, the state’s critics haven’t given up. In November, Alaska Wildlife Alliance — joined by the Center for Biological Diversity — filed a new legal challenge. The lawsuit focuses less on caribou than on bears: The groups allege that the state “authorized the unchecked killing” of bears without taking a “hard look” at bear population data.
State officials, for their part, have said they are targeting bears in a small area for a limited amount of time and that the wider population is not at risk. (Alaska is home to some 30,000 grizzlies.) “We’re not going to drive brown bear numbers in Southwest Alaska into the ground,” Scott said in an interview before the latest lawsuit was filed.
HOW DO YOU MANAGE a struggling caribou population when you have limited data and competing values?
Managers typically have three tools at their disposal, said Anne Gunn, a British Columbia-based wildlife biologist who has studied caribou for decades. They can influence habitat through industrial development policies — restricting road, mine and pipeline construction, for instance. They can regulate hunting. And they can kill or capture predators.
The most effective strategy is to regulate development, several scientists told High Country News. Caribou are capable of remembering remarkably subtle details about landscapes and surviving in harsh conditions, but they’re also famously sensitive to industrial activity. Access to open habitat is critical, Gunn said: Making sure they have ample space to make decisions “is likely way more important than predator control.”
Generally speaking, she added, removing predators might be useful under dire circumstances, when caribou numbers are extremely low and other measures have failed. But no matter which levers managers pull, they tend to be locked into “reductionist science.” Focusing on a single factor, whether grizzly bears or nutrition, inevitably fails to capture the highly complex dynamics between caribou and their ecosystems. “Our thinking and the actual techniques that we can use are mismatched to the subtlety and the intricacy of the systems that we are ‘conserving’ or ‘managing,’” Gunn said.
Given this mismatch, it’s no wonder that the science and politics of management remain fraught. In the Mulchatna debate, everyone seems to agree that caribou are important. And everyone seems to want conservation. They just don’t agree on how to achieve it.
“I don’t think there’s a silver-bullet perfect solution, unfortunately,” said Nicole Schmitt, executive director of Alaska Wildlife Alliance. One place to start, though, would be “reframing our expectations about what we can do,” she added. “We just need to have a really honest kind of look in the metaphorical mirror about what it is we’re chasing.”
“I don’t think there’s a silver-bullet perfect solution, unfortunately.”
As the controversy continues, the Mulchatna caribou hunt remains closed, aside from an isolated and very limited harvest on remote federal lands on the eastern edge of the range. Janet Bavilla has tried to fill the gap with other foods, like fish, marine mammals and moose, as well as store-bought goods that she orders from Anchorage, more than 400 miles away.
“Moose is nice if you can get it,” she said. But it isn’t enough to replace caribou, in part because reaching moose habitat is increasingly difficult as snow conditions become more unpredictable.
For now, Bavilla is taking solace in the recent increase in the herd’s numbers. She hopes that someday she’ll once again head out on her snow machine in search of caribou and return home with a good haul of meat.
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This article appeared in the March 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The messy politics of protecting Alaska’s struggling caribou.”
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