Former Yellowstone Park Ranger, Norm Bishop, commenting on the "sharpshooter" and nefarious statements of the PROPERTY AND ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH CENTER(PERC) as it relates to their criticisms of Yellowstone's wildlife management paradigm

PERC's Brennan Jorgensen  (The grizzly art of national park justice) continues a tradition of gratuitous attacks on the management of Yellowstone National Park that had its high water mark in Alston Chase's 1986 Playing God in Yellowstone.  Having been a park ranger in the park from 1980 to 1997, I witnessed and participated in wildlife  management that Chase and PERC eagerly denigrated, with the apparent motive of destroying the reputation of federal management so as to make the case for a free market takeover of our national parks. 


In the recent case of a bear being put down for killing one man and feeding on another, I challenge Jorgensen to cite one example of political pressure influencing the decision to kill the bear.  Instead, we can be confident that the motivation behind removing that bear was to promote public safety.  The remaining 600 bears in the greater Yellowstone population are well served by the removal of man eaters.  In fact, in the 31 years I've been a witness to bear management in the park, I recall that every bear that consumed humans was removed, with one exception; when the bear simply could not be found.  That was the bear that killed Brigitta Fredenhagen in 1984.  The bear that killed Bill Tesinski in 1986 was shot.  The bear that killed Roger May at Rainbow Point on Hebgen Lake in 1983 was also destroyed.  Most of the bears that killed humans were habituated to human foods.  That is why the park has spent millions to separate bears from human foods - to keep them and park visitors alive.


Norman A. Bishop
4898 Itana Circle
Bozeman, MT 59715
582-0597


A bit of background, just among us folks:  The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) has a long history of criticizing national park management, particularly at Yellowstone.  Dr. Charles Kay, whose "Yellowstone's Northern Elk Herd: A critical Examination of the 'Natural Regulation' Paradigm, (Ph.D. dissertation, Utah State University, 1990) used questionable citations to discredit natural regulation.  Kay was also the Svengali behind Alston Chase, who urged the latter to write Playing God in Yellowstone (1988), a scathing polemic about Yellowstone National Park management.  In the 1980s, Chase and Kay criticized the park for allowing so many elk to persist in the park.  Later, after wolves were restored, PERC hired Kay to discredit wolf recovery, even though all the science pointed to an improvement in ecosystem functioning with fewer elk post-wolf recovery.  One authority considers Kay's motivation behind all his criticism is to promote public big game hunting in the park.


It would be laughable, if not so tragic, that PERC has such a short institutional memory.  They were in total support of the Reagan administration's initiative to privatize park management (give it over to Disney and the like).  Free market environmentalism is their forte.  They manage to discount global warming, giving aid and comfort to the denialists.  I haven't checked what corporations support the Hoover Institution, but I have two prime suspects:  Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute.


Norm B.