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Lawmakers on Thursday killed a controversial plan that could have allowed grizzly bears to one day return to California.The Assembly Appropriations Committee spiked Inglewood Democratic Sen. Laura Richardson’s Senate Bill 1305. The measure would have tasked the California Department of Fish and Wildlife with creating a “roadmap that evaluates whether, and under what conditions, reintroduction of the grizzly bear is feasible and advisable.”
As is typical with the Legislature’s appropriations committees, lawmakers didn’t discuss the bill; nor did they take public testimony before the committee’s chairperson, Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, announced the decision.
Grizzlies once lived across most of California. As many as 10,000 may have roamed before the Gold Rush. They were so prevalent that when California settlers tried to form their own nation, they called it the Bear Flag Republic. A grizzly bear is memorialized on California’s flag.
Settlers systematically exterminated the animals. They were gone by the 1920s, leaving the smaller black bear as California’s only surviving native bear species.
Two Native American tribes consponsored the bill, and several animal welfare and environmental groups supported it. They argued that bringing the second largest land predator back to America’s most populated state would right an ecological wrong and help restore California’s degraded ecosystem.
Opponents included ranchers, hunting associations and rural communities. They argued that California is far too populated with people to sustain another apex predator. Rural communities are already overwhelmed with conflicts with mountain lions, black bears and wolves that attack livestock and wander into their towns, opponents said.
The measure set aside no funding for the study, but it allowed for a future Legislature or an outside group to do so.
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