For now, the only place you’ll find grizzlies in California are in zoos or on the state flag.
Aug 16, 2026
Updated 11:05 am PT
Ryan Sabalow, CalMatters
A grizzly bear at Yellowstone National Park in 2017. Grizzlies once lived across most of California. As many as 10,000 may have roamed before the Gold Rush. (Jim Peaco/National Park Service)
As is typical with the Legislature’s appropriations committees, lawmakers didn’t discuss the bill; nor did they take public testimony before the committee’s chairperson, Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland, announced the decision.
Wicks later told reporters that before intentionally reintroducing grizzly bears, the state must figure out how humans can best coexist with predatory wildlife. She pointed to the controversial return of gray wolves to California and the subsequent loss of cattle.
“The state needs to really invest in how we are actually addressing and dealing with those conflicts,” she said.
It is often said that the bear on the modern California state flag is based on “Monarch,” one of the last grizzly bears to live in the state. But researchers now believe it was based on the drawing of another bear, Samson. (Joseph Sohm/Getty Images)
Grizzlies once lived across most of California. As many as 10,000 may have roamed before the Gold Rush.
They were so prevalent that when California settlers tried to form their own nation, they called it the Bear Flag Republic. A grizzly bear is memorialized on California’s flag.
Settlers systematically exterminated the animals. They were gone by the 1920s, leaving the smaller black bear as California’s only surviving native bear species.
Two Native American tribes consponsored the bill, and several animal welfare and environmental groups supported it.
They argued that bringing the second largest land predator back to America’s most populated state would right an ecological wrong and help restore California’s degraded ecosystem.
Opponents included ranchers, hunting associations and rural communities. They argued California is far too populated with people to sustain another apex predator.
Rural communities are already overwhelmed with conflicts with mountain lions, black bears and wolves that attack livestock and wander into their towns, opponents said.
The measure set aside no funding for the study, but it allowed for a future Legislature or an outside group to do so.
Yue Stella Yu contributed reporting.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.