WYOMING – Sentences were imposed earlier this week for two Wyoming men convicted of wrongful taking of game.
In one incident, initially reported by the Cody Enterprise, a Casper man was fined $25,000 for shooting and killing a grizzly at his hunt camp near Cody. He claimed self-defense but an investigation by Wyoming Game Wardens found otherwise.
Cody district warden coordinator Scott Werbelow said he interviewed Brent Stalkup, 38, from Casper about the incident just hours after it happened.
After first calling the office, Stalkup told wardens when they arrived he had a bear encounter.
He explained that a grizzly bear approached his hunt game so he sic’d his dog on it. The dog chased the bear off but the bear returned about 10 minutes later. Stalkup showed the wardens video of the dog chasing the bear but that only made Werbelow more suspicious.
“If he was fearing for his life about this bear, would he have really taken the time to video it?” Werbelow wondered.
After the bear returned a third time, according to Stalkup, he shot it with a .22 caliber rifle. He said he wasn’t meaning to kill the bear, he said he merely wanted to “bump it in the rear” with a warning, feeling the low caliber would not hamper the bear much, maybe just scare it.
Werbelow checked the bear’s tracks. He saw no evidence it made three approaches to camp, but only one.
“I then asked him to tell me the whole story,” Werbelow said.
Werbelow told Stalkup it would be dangerous to look for a wounded bear in thick timber. Stalkup said he was pretty sure he would find it dead.
“Sure enough, we started tracking the bear’s movements. We found a dead sow grizzly around 3-4 years of age about 60 yards from where he said he shot it,” Werbelow said.
Werbelow informed Stalkup he would take the bear for a necropsy. It was skinned out and investigators found a .22 caliber slug that had entered the rear of the bear and traveled toward the front of the bear, indicating it was shot while moving away from Stalkup, not toward him.
Lucky shot? Maybe. A .22 is very rarely enough bullet to bring down a 400-pound grizzly bear but Stalkup had the gear to do it.
“He had a very accurate .22—a Sako with a Leupold scope,” Werbelow said. “Even though he claimed he just fired quickly from the hip.”
In the end, Werbelow said Stalkup had the opportunity to do a number of things besides killing the grizzly. His department recommended hunting privileges be suspended for two years in addition to fines. Stalkup hired an attorney and eventually accepted a plea deal that included one year.
Another man from Cody was ordered to pay nearly $2,000 for killing a wolf in the state’s trophy zone without a license, according to a story in the Powell Tribune.
