---
title: "Should the grizzly return to California? A bill asks the state to study it"
description: "The bear on the state flag has been gone from California for over a century. Now a bill that has passed the Senate would have Fish and Wildlife study whether grizzlies could be brought back. Tribes and environmentalists back it; ranchers, hunters and many rural residents say a vanished apex predator does not belong in the California of today."
category: "California"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/california
author: "Mei-Lin Tang"
published: 2026-07-23T13:36:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-23T13:36:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/should-the-grizzly-return-to-california-a-bill-asks-the-state-to-study-it
tags: ["grizzly-bears", "california", "wildlife", "conservation", "fish-and-wildlife"]
---
# Should the grizzly return to California? A bill asks the state to study it

The bear on the state flag has been gone from California for over a century. Now a bill that has passed the Senate would have Fish and Wildlife study whether grizzlies could be brought back. Tribes and environmentalists back it; ranchers, hunters and many rural residents say a vanished apex predator does not belong in the California of today.

California put a grizzly bear at the center of its flag and then, within living memory of the state's founding generation, wiped the animal off its land entirely. A bill moving through the Legislature asks whether that should be undone, [CalMatters reports](https://calmatters.org/newsletter/grizzly-bears-return-to-california/).

## What the bill actually does

It is worth being precise, because "bring back the grizzly" overstates it. The measure, which has passed the state Senate and is now before the Assembly, would direct the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to study the feasibility of reintroducing grizzly bears. It commissions a question, not a bear release. But the question alone is enough to have reopened one of the state's oldest arguments about what its wild land is for.

## The history under it

The context explains the emotion. Before the Gold Rush, California may have held as many as 10,000 grizzlies. Then settlers hunted and exterminated them systematically, and the last known California grizzly died more than a century ago. The animal survives now only as a symbol, most prominently on the state flag, a daily reminder of a species the state both reveres and eradicated.

## The two sides, fairly

The divide is real and breaks along familiar lines, and both sides have a genuine case.

Supporters, largely Democratic lawmakers from urban Southern California districts, along with tribes, environmentalists and animal-welfare groups, frame reintroduction as ecological and moral repair. Tiana Williams-Claussen, who directs the Yurok Tribe's wildlife department, put the loss in personal terms: "I can see the ways in which my homeland has suffered from the loss of iconic species such as the grizzly."

Opponents, largely rural residents, ranchers, hunting groups and nearly all the Republican senators who voted no, argue that a landscape transformed by 150 years of development, farms, highways, exurbs, cannot simply reabsorb an apex predator, and that the state is already managing conflicts with mountain lions and returning wolves. Some make the case on the bears' behalf. Elizabeth Washoe, from Modoc County, argued the animals are better left where they thrive: "We'd take them and put them here in a landscape so dramatically changed."

## The real question

Strip away the flag symbolism and the fight is a practical one: whether a modern, heavily populated California has the room, and the tolerance, for an animal it romanticizes from a safe distance. Reintroducing an apex predator is not a gesture; it is a decades-long commitment with real costs to real people who live near where the bears would go, and real benefits that conservation biologists argue ripple through an ecosystem.

The bill does not resolve that. It asks the state's wildlife scientists to tell lawmakers whether it is even possible, and at what cost. That study, if the Assembly agrees to it, is where the romance of the flag meets the arithmetic of the land, and the Herald will report what it finds.

## Sources

- [Should grizzly bears roam California again?](https://calmatters.org/newsletter/grizzly-bears-return-to-california/)