It's time for game wardens to get tough

They call it a "hip pocket" law that game wardens should only use when absolutely necessary - namely, citations for illegally feeding bears or other wildlife.

Well, when 24 grizzly bears wind up dead and local bear managers are running in circles trying to keep up with an overwhelming number of conflicts between bears and people, it may be time to reach for the hip pocket more often.

Understandably, local bear managers Tim Manley and Eric Wenum prefer to avoid hard-nosed approaches to private property owners who wind up with bear problems. Most of the time, after all, those property owners are willing to do what's necessary to keep bears away from their places.

But sometimes they're not. Some rural homeowners seem to do whatever is necessary to AVOID doing what's recommended. These are folks that deserve more than repeated visits.

These folks deserve the hip pocket law - which makes it illegal to intentionally feed bears - as fast as a referee throws a flag for blatant penalties on the football field.

True enough, it can be legally challenging to prove people "intentionally" fed wildlife. But game wardens and county prosecutors shouldn't hesitate to try, just to make people aware that the law exists and there are people willing to prosecute it.

So far this year, only one citation has been issued, even though there have been more than a few "borderline" cases where citations might have been issued.

We normally wouldn't be encouraging state officials to tell private property owners what to do and how to act. But this is different, because those who repeatedly attract bears to their property are not creating problems just for themselves or the bears.

They literally create habituated, repeat offenders that go from one house to the next, damaging property and potentially creating a threat to public safety.

And those bears usually keep up the same behavior for the rest of their lives, which can be unfortunately short. Habituated bears usually end up dead.

When that happens to grizzly bears, a broader public interest of recovering a threatened species is undermined. And at great cost. After nearly 30 years since the grizzly bear was listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act, state and federal governments have spent gobs of money and time to reverse the fortunes of grizzly bears. They have also implemented a number of policies that many consider to be costly in a socio-economic sense.

It's an outright setback to all those efforts when a record 24 grizzly bears, including 14 females, die. That's the toll so far this year, and the mortality list includes many bears that died because of their outright habituation to finding food near human dwellings.

Wardens should use every tool at their disposal to discourage the habituation of bears. Not only because the costs are so high, but also because the message repeatedly given to people who have bear trouble is so simple: Keep your garbage locked up and bring in the birdseed and animal feed.