In the early 1900s, long before smartphones and selfie sticks, tourists flocked to Yellowstone National Park — not for the geysers or scenery, but for a grotesque show: A nightly spectacle of grizzly bears raiding cafeteria scraps from open-pit landfills like desperate, starving pirates.
The bears were in dangerous proximity to humans: Hungry bears tore at open car windows. Tourists posed a little too close with their film cameras. Yellowstone park rangers logged dozens of injuries each year — nearly 50 on average.
Eventually, the Park Service ended the nightly landfill shows: feeding wild animals human food wasn’t just dangerous, it was unnatural. Bears, ecologists argued, should eat berries, nuts, elk — not leftover Twinkies. In 1970, the park finally shut down the landfills for good.
By then, though, grizzlies were in deep trouble. As few as 700 remained in the lower 48 states, down from the estimated 50,000 that once roamed the 18 Western states. Decades of trapping, shooting, and poisoning had brought them to the brink. The ones that clung to survival in Yellowstone National Park learned to take what scraps they could get and when they were forced to forage elsewhere, it didn’t go so well.
More bears died. Their already fragile population in the Yellowstone region dipped to fewer than 250, though one publication says the number could have been as low as 136, according to Frank van Manen, who spent 14 years leading the US Geological Survey’s grizzly bear study team and now serves as an emeritus ecologist.
The Yellowstone bears had been trained to rely on us. And when we cut them off, their population tanked.
And so in 1975, the US Fish and Wildlife Service placed grizzly bears on the endangered species list, the country’s most powerful legal mechanism to stave off extinction.
The grizzly’s place on the list afforded them some important protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Hunting was off limits, as was trapping or poisoning, and the listing included rigorous habitat protections. Grizzlies slowly came back.
Today, more than 1,000 grizzly bears live in and around Yellowstone alone, and tourists who visit the park by the millions every year can observe the bears — no longer desperately feeding on trash but lumbering in and out of meadows with their trailing cubs, or sitting on their haunches feasting on elk carcasses.
The recovery effort was a major success, but it’s brought a whole new slate of issues.
In recent years, grizzlies have spilled out of their stronghold in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem — a broad swath of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming — and into human territory, where coexistence gets messy. In 2024 alone, more than 60 grizzlies were killed in Wyoming, most of them lethally removed by wildlife officials after killing cattle, breaking into cabins and trash cans, or lingering in residential neighborhoods.
It’s the classic species recovery paradox: the more bears succeed and their populations expand, the more trouble they get into with humans.
And now, a controversial debate rages over whether or not to delist the grizzly bear. No species is meant to be a permanent resident on the Endangered Species List. The whole point of the ESA is to help species recover to the point where they’re no longer endangered. A delisting would underscore that the grizzlies didn’t just scrape by in the Yellowstone area — they exceeded every population requirement in becoming a thriving, self-sustaining population of at least 500 bears.
But to remove federal protection would mean grizzly bears would face increasing threats to their survival at a time when some biologists argue the species’ recovery is shaky at best.
The stakes here are bigger than just the grizzly bear alone — what happens next is about proving that the ESA works, and that sustained recovery is possible, and that ESA protection leads to progress. Because if a species like the grizzly, which has met every biological benchmark, still can’t graduate from the list, then what is the list for?
“The [ESA] is literally one of the strictest wildlife protection laws in the world…but in order for people to buy into it, they have to have respect for it,” says Kelly Heber Dunning, a University of Wyoming professor who studies wildlife conflict. “If it starts to be seen as…part of the culture war, that buy-in will go away.”
What’s the Endangered Species Act for anyway?
Since President Donald Trump has taken office, the Republican Party’s assault on the Endangered Species Act hasn’t been subtle.
The Fix Our Forests Act — which sounds like it attempts a wildfire and forest health solution — actually fast-tracks large-scale logging at the expense of fragile ecosystems and imperiled species. Trump allies in Congress, like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert with the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, flagrantly prioritize political agendas over science, according to the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council. The House Natural Resources Committee has also suggested weakening the Marine Mammal Protection Act with an apparent intent to unravel protections for species like the North Atlantic right whale and the Gulf of Mexico Rice’s whale. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has called to remove “burdensome regulations” standing in the way of Trump’s desire to unleash America’s energy potential. Project 2025, the conservative playbook, even explicitly calls to delist the grizzly bear.
But ironically, to prevent a full unraveling of one of the world’s most powerful protections for wildlife and wild places, conservationists need to grapple with the mission creep of the ESA.
When Republican President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, the country’s wildlife had been in a century-long nosedive. After decades of habitat destruction, unregulated hunting and industrial expansion, federal officials had already flagged more than 70 species at risk of extinction — with many more lining up behind them.
In the decades that followed, the ESA proved to be one of the most powerful conservation tools in the world. More than 50 species, including the Canada goose and bald eagle, thrived with their newfound federal protections and were later delisted; another 56 species were downgraded from endangered to threatened. But others, like the black-footed ferret, Houston toad and the red wolf, for example, remain endangered — even after almost 60 years of federal attention.
Today the act protects more than 2,300 plant and animal species in the US and abroad. And still more wait in line, as overworked federal biologists triage petitions amid dwindling resources, aggressive layoffs and budget cuts.
But when it comes to the grizzly bear, the debate has become bigger than just biology — it’s become a referendum on what the Endangered Species Act is for, says David Willms, a National Wildlife Federation associate vice president and adjunct faculty at the University of Wyoming.
“The ESA is a science-based act,” he says. “You have a species that is struggling, and you need to recover it and make it not struggle anymore. And based on the best available science at the end of the day, you’re supposed to delist a species if it met those objectives.”
The trouble begins when species linger on the list indefinitely, not because they haven’t recovered but because of what might happen next, out of fears of possible future threats.
But the ESA was only meant to safeguard against “reasonably foreseeable future threats,” Willms argues. Congress has the ability to protect species indefinitely — like it did for wild horses under the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act or for numerous species of birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. But those were specific, deliberate laws.
“If there are other reasons why somebody or groups of people think grizzly bears should be protected forever, then that is a different conversation than the Endangered Species Act,” he says.
But this power works in the opposite direction, too. If grizzly bears stay on the list for too long, Congress may well decide to delist the species, as lawmakers did in 2011 when they removed gray wolves from the endangered species list in Montana and Idaho.
Those kinds of decisions happen when people living alongside recovered species, especially the toothy, livestock-loving kind, spend enough time lobbying their state’s lawmakers, says Dunning, the wildlife conflict researcher.
When Congress steps in, science tends to step out. A political delisting doesn’t just sideline biologists, it sets a precedent, one that opens the potential for lawmakers to start cherry-picking species they see as obstacles to grazing, logging, drilling, or building. The flamboyant lesser prairie chicken has already made the list of legislative targets.
“Right now, the idea of scientific research has lost its magic quality,” she says. “We get there by excluding people and not listening to their voices and them feeling like they’re not part of the process.”
And when people feel excluded for too long, she says, the danger isn’t just that support for grizzly bears will erode. It’s that the public will to protect any endangered species might start to collapse.
The case for delisting the grizzly
For Dan Thompson, Wyoming’s large carnivore supervisor, the question of delisting grizzlies is pretty simple: “Is the population recovered with all the regulatory mechanisms in place and data to support that it will remain recovered?” he says. “If the answer is yes, then the answer to delisting is yes.”
That’s why Thompson believes it’s time to delist the grizzly. And he’s not alone. The Greater Yellowstone ecosystem population is “doing very well,” says van Manen. In fact, grizzlies met their recovery goals about 20 years ago.
Getting there wasn’t easy. After the landfills closed and the bear population plummeted, it took a massive, decades-long effort from states, tribes, federal biologists, and nonprofits to bring the grizzlies back. The various entities funded bear-proof trash systems for people living in towns near the national parks and strung electric fences around tempting fruit orchards. They developed safety workshops for people living in or visiting bear country, and tracked down poachers.
And little by little, it worked. Bear numbers swelled, and by the mid-2000s, more than 600 bears roamed the Yellowstone area.
Given this success, the US Fish & Wildlife Service proposed delisting the grizzlies for the first time in late 2005. Environmental groups sued, arguing bears needed continued federal protection as whitebark pine, an important food source, diminished. Bears could starve, groups maintained, and their populations could plummet again. But a subsequent federal study of what, exactly, grizzly bears eat, found that while grizzlies do munch whitebark pine seeds during bumper years, they don’t depend on the trees to survive. In fact, grizzlies consume no fewer than 266 species of everything from bison and mice to fungi and even one type of soil.
“Grizzly bears are incredibly opportunistic and use their omnivorous traits to shift to other food sources,” says van Manen. So losing one food — even a high-calorie one — did little to change the population.
The move to delist them paused as the federal government addressed the federal court’s concerns, including researching the grizzly bear’s diet.
And bear numbers kept climbing. In 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service — under President Barack Obama — updated delisting requirements including more expansive habitat protections, stricter conflict prevention, and enhanced monitoring. The agency then proposed a delisting. The following year — under Trump — it delisted the grizzly bear.
This time the Crow Indian Tribe sued and — determining in part that delisting grizzlies in the Yellowstone region threatened the recovery of other populations of grizzlies — a federal judge overturned the government’s decision to delist the bears and placed them back on the list. In 2022, Wyoming petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to delist bears in the Yellowstone region. The service took a few years to analyze the issue, and then this January, days before the Biden administration ended, it issued a response to that petition: Grizzly bears would stay on the Endangered Species List.
All of these years of back and forth reflected the change in how the federal government viewed the grizzly population, largely a result of the bear’s own success. The Yellowstone region’s bears, they argued, are no longer distinct from bear populations in northern Montana, Idaho, and Washington. And because northern populations haven’t met the recovery benchmarks yet (with the exception of a population in and around Glacier National Park), the species as a whole is not yet recovered.
But the goalposts for delisting grizzlies keep moving, Thompson told Vox.
Grizzly bears would still be managed even after a delisting. States would be responsible for them, and — miracle of miracles — state and federal agencies actually agreed on how to manage grizzlies after ESA protections end.
Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana are committed to maintaining between 800 and 950 grizzly bears if the creature ever leaves the endangered species list. And states like Wyoming know how to manage grizzly bears because for years, under the supervision of the feds, they’ve been doing the gritty, ground-level work. Wyoming’s wildlife agency, for example, traps and relocates conflict bears (or kills problem bears if allowed by the Fish and Wildlife Service), knocks on doors to calm nervous landowners, hands out bear spray, and reminds campers not to cook chili in their tents.
Despite all that, “nobody trusts us,” Thompson, with Wyoming’s state wildlife agency, said. “There’s always going to be a way to find a reason for [grizzlies] not to be delisted.”
Delisting now might be the right decision. It would still be a gamble
Even though grizzly bears may be thriving in numbers, they’re not ready to go it alone, says Matt Cuzzocreo, interim wildlife program manager for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition Grizzlies.
The Greater Yellowstone Coalition has spent millions of dollars over the past few decades helping bears and humans more successfully coexist. But whatever comes next needs to build on the past 50 years of working with locals. As bears expand into new territory, they’re crossing into areas where residents aren’t used to securing garbage and wouldn’t know how to respond to 600-pound predators ambling down back roads or into neighborhoods.
Simply removing bears from the list and handing management to the states, which is the default after a species delisting, isn’t enough, says Chris Servheen — not when so much is still in flux. Servheen, who led the Fish and Wildlife Service’s recovery program for 35 years, helped write the previous two recovery plans. He says a delisting could leave them dangerously exposed.
“Politicians are making decisions on the fate of animals like grizzly bears and taking decisions out of the hands of biologists,” Servheen says.
Montana and Idaho, Servheen points out, already allow neck-snaring and wolf trapping just outside Yellowstone’s borders — traps that also pose a lethal threat to grizzlies. And now, the Trump administration has slashed funding for the very biologists and forest managers tasked with protecting wildlife.
Once states take over, many are expected to push for grizzly hunting seasons, and some, like Wyoming, have already set grizzly bear hunting regulations for when the creatures are no longer protected. Layer that on top of existing threats — roadkill, livestock conflicts, illegal kills — and it’s easy to imagine a swift population slide.
“It’s a perfect storm for grizzlies,” Servheen says. “We’re seeing attacks on public land agencies, the sidelining of science, predator-hostile politicians muscling into wildlife decisions, and relentless pressure from private land development. Walking away from the grizzly now — after all we’ve invested — just feels like the worst possible timing.”
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