This bill directs federal land management agencies to close a policy gap that allows the practice known as “bear baiting” on some Federal public lands. It requires agency-level rulemaking and enforcement to stop people from intentionally providing human-scented foods that attract bears, and it frames the change as a public-safety and wildlife-management measure.
For professionals: the measure ties together existing National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service prohibitions with new regulatory mandates for the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, adds a limited welfare/safety/research exception, and establishes a short deadline for agency action. Expect administrative implementation, intergovernmental friction with State hunting rules, and questions about enforcement tools and funding.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill directs the Secretary of the Interior to enforce existing National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service prohibitions against feeding wildlife for hunting purposes, and it requires the Secretary of the Interior (for BLM lands) and the Secretary of Agriculture (for National Forest lands) to adopt final regulations forbidding intentional feeding of bears on those federal lands. The measure allows targeted exceptions for bear welfare, public safety, or authorized research.
Who It Affects
Federal land managers (NPS, FWS, BLM, Forest Service), hunters (including those who use baiting), state wildlife agencies that regulate hunting, park and refuge visitors, and agencies that respond to human-bear conflicts. Private landowners are not regulated by this bill.
Why It Matters
It eliminates a federal-level inconsistency between visitor guidance and on-the-ground hunting practices, forces rulemaking within a compressed timeframe, and creates a new point of contact between federal and state hunting regimes — with potential effects on hunter behavior, agency budgets, and dispute resolution over access and enforcement.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill is short and procedural: it builds on existing regulatory language in two sets of federal regulations and orders the remaining federal land managers to mirror that approach. For parks and refuges the text points agencies to particular regulatory prohibitions and tells them to enforce those rules against the practice of using food to lure bears to an area for hunting.
For Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands the bill requires agencies to write and finalize new rules addressing the same conduct, with a single-year deadline set in statute.
Implementation will look like administrative rulemaking plus on-the-ground steps. Agencies will need to draft regulatory text, take public comment where rulemaking procedures require it, and then put into place enforcement mechanisms — likely signage, outreach to hunters and visitor groups, removal or clean-up of bait stations, and the use of existing administrative penalties and permit conditions where available.
The bill permits agencies to carve out narrow exceptions for cases where feeding is necessary for the welfare of an individual bear, to protect public safety, or as part of authorized wildlife research; those exceptions will require internal policies and documentation standards.Operationally, federal managers will face coordination tasks: aligning new federal rules with overlapping State hunting laws, training enforcement staff, and deciding how to handle bait stations that sit on the edge of federal parcels. Notably, the bill does not prescribe new criminal penalties or create a new federal offense; it relies on agencies’ regulatory and enforcement toolkits.
That leaves open questions about the scale and methods of enforcement that each agency will adopt.
The Five Things You Need to Know
Section 2(b) and 2(c) direct the Secretary of the Interior to apply and enforce existing prohibitions found in 36 C.F.R. §2.2(a)(2) (National Park Service) and 50 C.F.R. §32.2(h) (Fish and Wildlife Service) against using food to lure bears for hunting.
Section 2(d) explicitly requires the Secretary of the Interior (for BLM) and the Secretary of Agriculture (for the Forest Service) to issue final regulations banning intentional feeding of bears on their lands, with those final regulations due within one year after enactment.
The statute includes an exception clause: agencies must provide for extraordinary-case exemptions where feeding is required for bear welfare, public safety, or authorized wildlife research, but it leaves the standards and processes for those exemptions to the agencies.
The bill’s Findings list 13 numbered points that the sponsors use to justify federal action, including claims about bait stations increasing bear reproduction, habituation to people, property damage, and reduced park bear encounters after prior NPS waste and feeding reforms. Those findings shape legislative intent and will guide agency rulemaking.
The text does not create a new criminal statute or specify new penalties; enforcement must proceed under existing agency regulatory authorities and enforcement mechanisms (administrative citations, permit conditions, or other agency sanctions).
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Short title
Names the measure the "Don’t Feed the Bears Act of 2025." This is purely stylistic but signals the bill’s focus for rulemaking and agency guidance that will follow.
Congressional findings
Sets out 13 findings summarizing agency practices, hunting bait-station composition and persistence, ecological and safety harms, and comparisons to past NPS waste-management reforms and migratory bird baiting prohibitions. These findings are the statute’s legislative intent language and will be useful for agencies defending the rules in administrative proceedings and potential litigation.
Enforce existing NPS regulation
Directs the Interior Secretary to enforce the specific National Park Service regulatory prohibition against feeding wildlife on units of the National Park System to target baiting that entices bears to be hunted. Practically, this directs NPS law enforcement and management to treat bear-baiting incidents as violations of the cited rule and to incorporate that approach into park policies and visitor messaging.
Enforce existing FWS refuge regulation
Tells the Interior Secretary to apply the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regulatory ban on baiting to wildlife refuges. The practical implication is that refuge managers and refuge law enforcement will bring existing regulatory prohibitions to bear on bear-baiting conduct and coordinate with state partners where hunting on refuges is permitted.
Rulemaking requirement for BLM and USFS
Requires the Secretary of the Interior (for BLM lands) and the Secretary of Agriculture (for National Forest lands) to promulgate final regulations prohibiting intentional feeding of bears — including for hunting bait — and sets a statutory deadline of one year for issuing those final rules. This forces agencies to prioritize the subject in their rulemaking calendars and to define enforcement mechanisms, exceptions, and compliance processes during that period.
Narrow exceptions for welfare, safety, research
Mandates that any rules adopted include an allowance for exceptional circumstances when feeding is necessary for bear welfare, public safety, or authorized research. Agencies must therefore write exemption criteria and documentation requirements into the regulatory text, a process that will raise questions about who approves exemptions and how they are reviewed.
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Who Benefits
- Campground visitors and nearby communities — fewer food-conditioned bears should reduce property damage, campsite raids, and the small but serious risk of human injury. The bill’s intent is to lower habituation-driven encounters.
- Non-bait hunting participants — hunters who do not use baiting will face less competition from bait-dependent practices on federal lands and may benefit from clearer, uniform rules across different federal land units.
- Wildlife managers and conservation NGOs — the bill gives federal managers a statutory basis to act and strengthens arguments for practices that reduce human-bear conflicts and nuisance killings of habituated bears.
Who Bears the Cost
- Hunters and hunting organizations that use baiting — those who legally employ baiting under state law but rely on federal land access will lose that option on federal parcels and may need to shift tactics or grounds.
- Federal land management agencies (BLM and U.S. Forest Service) — they must spend staff time and funds to draft rules, run public processes, issue guidance, train crews, and enforce compliance; those burdens fall on agency budgets unless Congress provides supplemental funds.
- State wildlife agencies and local economies — states that allow baiting may see displaced hunting activity onto private lands or complaint-driven coordination costs; rural hunting economies that rely on bait-based success could face localized revenue impacts.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is between two legitimate objectives that pull against each other: reducing public-safety and wildlife-management harms by ending food-based attractants versus preserving states’ authority and long-standing hunting practices on federal lands. The bill solves the first by imposing nationwide agency action, but it does so by inserting federal regulatory uniformity into an arena where states and hunting constituencies have long exercised control — a trade-off that generates implementation friction, enforcement variability, and predictable political conflict.
The bill creates a clear policy objective but leaves key operational and legal questions open. It relies heavily on agencies’ existing regulatory authorities rather than specifying penalties, which means enforcement approaches will vary by agency and may depend on administrative procedures, permitting conditions, and available law-enforcement resources.
The one-year statutory deadline for issuing final regulations on BLM and Forest Service lands is short by federal rulemaking standards; compressed timelines increase litigation risk and may force agencies into expedited procedures or interim guidance that could be challenged.
The measure also raises federal–state friction. Hunting is traditionally regulated by states; this bill removes at least one practice from the field of play on federal parcels regardless of state permissiveness.
That could produce political and legal pushback from state wildlife agencies and hunting interests and could incentivize relocation of baiting to adjacent private lands, with mixed conservation effects. The exception clause is narrowly described but leaves agencies to define ‘‘extraordinary’’ circumstances, which will be a recurring implementation question and potential source of inconsistent application across units and regions.
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