ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An Anchorage Superior Court judge in an order issued this week denied a request to strike down a controversial state-sponsored predator control program that has so far killed 180 bears in Southwest Alaska.

But in the same ruling, Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin criticized the Alaska Department of Fish and Game effort as circumventing a previous court ruling that found the program was unlawful.

She stopped short of demanding the department halt the program, leaving open the possibility the state could resume shooting bears from a helicopter in the third year of a policy that state wildlife officials say they established to help rebuild the Mulchatna caribou herd.

“The Alaska Supreme Court has noted that injunctions and restraining orders are not an appropriate means for the judiciary to manage fish and game resources,” Rankin wrote in Wednesday’s decision.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the state will decide to begin killing bears this month as originally planned.

The decision this week came in response to a request for an injunction filed in April by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, an environmental advocacy group. The group sought a halt to the predator control season expected to resume this spring.

The request came after the Alaska Board of Game passed an emergency order in late March to keep the bear program on track weeks after a different judge ruled that it was unconstitutional.

In a written statement Thursday, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance did not address the judge’s denial of the injunction request, but said Rankin’s ruling upheld earlier findings that the program is unlawful and should not be executed.

If the state does move forward with the Mulchatna program this year, it’s the Alliance’s understanding that “they would be doing so in contempt of court,” the group said. The state’s emergency order still doesn’t meet the standards set by the original judge’s order in March, according to the group.

The Alaska Wildlife Alliance said its next legal steps will depend on how the state proceeds.

A spokesperson for Fish and Game said Thursday that the department was still assessing Rankin’s decision and did not yet have a comment.

Rankin’s ruling was narrowly focused on procedural elements involved in the state’s Mulchatna predator control program, rather than the merits of the program itself.

The state’s Mulchatna predator control program changed in 2023, when Fish and Game undertook a new initiative aiming to kill all bears on the herd’s calving grounds in order to reduce predation on newborn caribou.

For years, the Board of Game had authorized predator control on wolves in the area. But in 2022, the board approved the expansion of an existing predator control program to also target bears.

The Mulchatna herd numbered above 200,000 animals in 1997, a size some biologists say was beyond what the environment could support, and contributed to its collapse. State managers now estimate there are around 15,000 caribou in the herd, well below the objective of 30,000-80,000 they believe are needed to responsibly resume subsistence hunting.

State wildlife officials have acknowledged the broader factors at play like disease and a changing habitat, but say killing predators has been shown to increase calf numbers — and is one factor they can control.

In 2023, the state Division of Wildlife Conservation reported killing 99 bears— 94 brown, five black — during a roughly one-month period in an area between Dillingham and Bethel where the Mulchatna herd calves. The next year, state employees working from spotter planes and a helicopter shot another 84 brown bears.

State officials estimate the combined cost of both years of the predator control program in the area at nearly $817,000.

The court case began in 2023, when the Alaska Wildlife Alliance filed a lawsuit claiming the state and Board of Game had not given the public enough notice about the proposed expansion of predator control operations from just wolves to all bears in the calving area, which encompassed 530 square miles last season.

The lawsuit also argued the policy violates constitutional protections for natural resources, in part because the state doesn’t actually have good data on the number of bears in the region.

This March, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi sided with the Wildlife Alliance, writing that the state had not followed its own protocols, and deemed the program unconstitutional. Guidi’s order, however, was based on a finding that the process for approving and implementing the program was flawed, not that predator control itself, or culling bears to protect caribou stocks, was necessarily invalid.

Given the potential for the order to end the state’s ability to include bears in the Mulchatna predator control program, Fish and Game quickly brought an emergency petition to the full Board of Game to continue the program.

Rankin took over the case this month after Guidi retired May 1.

The Board of Game emergency order, the Wildlife Alliance’s lawyers argued this week, is more or less identical with the program Guidi found flawed, and does not negate the judge’s earlier finding.

“The emergency petition felt like it was a way to work around what the court had ordered,” the group’s executive director, Nicole Schmitt, said during testimony Tuesday.

The state disputed that characterization, arguing repeatedly that the Board of Game determined the Mulchatna caribou herd’s low population numbers constituted a crisis.

“The emergency is a biological one,” said Kimberly Del Frate, an assistant district attorney from the state Department of Law.

Rankin appeared unmoved by that reasoning and grilled the state’s attorney about it repeatedly during Wednesday’s five-hour hearing.

“The emergency wasn’t the biological one, it was the court order ... not anything that happened with the herd,” Rankin cut in at one point.

Rankin said during Tuesday’s hearing that she was “threading the needle” on what she had the authority to decide. She said she explicitly aimed to keep the hearing narrow, admonishing lawyers from both sides when they got too far into “the weeds” on either the science or procedural history of the case.

“I can’t invalidate the current order,” Rankin said Tuesday. “This court cannot say, ‘You can’t kill bears.’”

Rankin in her order said the state had failed to comply with the earlier Superior Court ruling, citing in particular the board’s March emergency order, which she said was also done without adequate public notice.

She wrote that the state’s argument to the contrary was “disingenuous.”

In defending the program, wildlife managers from Fish and Game have pointed to their statutory responsibility under state law to implement management policies that “restore the abundance or productivity of identified big game prey populations as necessary to achieve human consumptive use goals.”

“I didn’t think I could ignore the statutes,” Division of Wildlife Conservation director Ryan Scott testified Tuesday about the decision to pursue an emergency order after the court’s earlier ruling. “If there was a way to move forward with this year to conduct the operations, I felt like we should do that.”

In an interview after Tuesday’s hearing, Scott said Fish and Game did not have personnel in the field yet for aerial gunning operations because officials were waiting on the judge’s decision.

But there are a lot of logistics involved in the predator removal program, including caching aviation fuel in the areas where spotter planes and helicopters fly. Those plans have remained in motion through the latest court hearings, Scott said.

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