This piece originally appeared on High Country News’ Goat blog on Aug. 20, 2014
On the last day of August, 2012, a collared grizzly bear dubbed 726 by federal wildlife biologists vanished into the rugged Centennial Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border. A few weeks later, they recovered his collar near an established campsite. It appeared to have been cut, stoking suspicions that hunters may have shot the bear, a federally protected species, then hidden its carcass to avoid prosecution. Some environmental groups floated a more sinister theory (followed this June with a lawsuit), that the bear had been offed by a shepherd defending a flock that belonged not to a rancher, but to a federal institution: The Agricultural Research Service’s U.S. Sheep Experiment Station. More…
Sarah M. Gilman 