The ranchers came to the Grizzly Bear Interagency Grizzly Bear Winter's meeting at the behest of Madel and Tim Manley, also an FWP bear management specialist Madel helps landowners east of the Continental Divide live with grizzlies. Manley does the same west of the Divide.

Crary, whose ranch is on the Teton River near Choteau, said he doesn't mind having grizzlies on his place. He has, in fact, protected it With a conservation easement so his children will be able to see grizzly bears. "But have you ever addressed what kind of bears you want to save?" Crary asked. "A bear that's been captured two or three times and has a radio collar and blue streamers in his ears is not a wild bear. He's a circus animal. He's a side show."

Crary said he no longer calves on the river bottom, so he doesn't attract grizzly bears. Hayne said he protected some of his sheep with "electric fencing. " A lot of electric fence," he said.

Madel told of other ranchers who use noise makers to shoo grizzlies away from grain and electric fences to keep bears out of their beehives. No one, he said, leaves livestock carrion out like they once did.

West of the Divide, the problem more often bears in garages and at bird feeders in rural sub divisions, Manley said. "There, too, we are "asking people to change their life styles. There, too, most people like the wildlife, but don't want grizzly bears in their back yard."

Manley brought a videotape he made of two North Fork residents who could not attend Wednesday's meeting because of the snowy weather.

Lee Downs said he's stopped trying to keep chickens "on account of the grizzly bears. They just wore a trail around the chicken house. It wasn't worth it."

Eunice James said she doesn't feed the birds during the summer any more, and wishes none of her neighbors would either. It just attracts the bears, and that attracts game wardens intent on harassing the bears, she said.

"I don't like the way they harass the bears," James said. "And I think trapping makes bears have a worse feeling for humans. We ought to just let them do their thing."

The past four years, it seems like there have been more and more grizzlies said Downs. "I don't think we've got room for any more bears. I see a bear almost every time I go to my cabin now. Just out of Columbia Falls, they're getting some bears, too. They never had any when I was a boy. It's going to take something to educate those people down there."

What if the government paid landowners for letting grizzlies use their ground as habitat? one IGBC member asked.

"It's not about money," said Leanne Hayne. [It's all about POWER!]